Week 18 - Posted on 2013-08-10 by Isaiah Putman

This week we recorded one of my friends’ bluegrass bands, Sweet Sunshine & Honey. I originally asked them to come in and record together on Thursday but due to a miscommunication we ended up recording parts of the song on Monday: banjo, acoustic guitar, and vocals. We had to record them in an interesting sequence, 1) we recorded the guitar by itself because Rachel, the vocalist/guitarist, wanted to sing without playing at the same time, and we didn’t include banjo because the banjo player, Steven, needed the vocals to know where he was in the song, 2) then we recorded the vocals and banjo playing along to the recorded guitar track.

On Thursday we recorded the violin, upright bass, and background vocals. We had to try a couple different microphones on the bass to minimize the slapping effect which was rather aggressive. Sam, the bassist, also was having some wrist problems so we could only do a few takes. Would have liked a couple more but by the time we came back to it we didn’t have enough time. Not too many issues on the violin part, some pitch and tuning problems which we recorded over in alternate takes. The background vocals took several takes for one of the singers because he couldn’t quite sing as low as he wanted, so there were definite pitch issues, but nothing I couldn’t fix in Melodyne later.