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Jesse Kirkwood
This was my second session in the studio and I must say that I was not dissappointed. Maurice, owner of the Cut Recording Studio, set up a mock session for all of his apprentices to come and experience some hands-on training. Brian Jones was the engineer at the studio who helped us along the way and gave us guidence. I learned a lot about Pro Tools this last studio session and Brian made it very easy to learn.
The session was a stereo backing track, which contained all of the instrumentation and back up vocals, and about eight different vocal tracks. The first thing that Brian told us to do was to label everything and put them into groups. Color coding your different tracks is also a huge time saver. We learned to group the lead vocals and the back up vocals and assign them to their respective aux channels.
The next thing he showed us was how to bus all of the vocal tracks to desired aux channels so that we could add effects such as reverb and delay. This concept changed my life. I have always just added a plug-in to every single track that needed some reverb, delay, compression, etc. However, Brian showed us that with bussing you can apply an effect to multiple tracks and it takes up a fraction of the processing power--very good stuff to know! The next thing that we needed to tackle was the backing track which had all of the instrumentation. I learned a lot more about equalization during this processes of the session. The backing/instrumentation track was very bright and harsh on the top end and seemed a bit boomy. I learned how to set up and use the seven point eq plug-in that comes with Pro Tools. By narrowing the Q and sweeping the boosted frequency across the spectrum, I learned to find the problematic frequencies to apply a quick and affective subtractive eq. Once we applied a high pass and a low pass filter along with a steep subtractive bell curve around the 2200 Hz range, we had a pleasant, warm sounding instrument track. I believe we also applied a subtractive bell curve somewhere around 400Hz to get rid of some of the "boxiness". Once we had applied all of the subtractive eq's we didn't really need to boost anything because it was sounding pretty good. The dynamics could stand to be a bit more even though. Brian walked me through a vintage compressor plug-in and showed me how to set the ratio, attack, release, input and output so that it wasn't grabbing the signal too much, but allowing the compressor to breathe with the music. We got the compressor to where it was just squashing the signal a few dB and we also boosted the gain a little to make up for it. The vintage compressor added a nice gooey, warm color to the mix. Then there were the vocals.
The vocal tracks were, quite literally, all over the place. The guy who sent this Pro Tools session to the studio recorded each phrase on a different tracks, so we ended up having 5 different lead vocal tracks. Not only were they spread across five different tracks, but the dynamics were a bit un-even as well. A cool Pro Tools tip I learned is that if you have multiple segments of wav files like we did, you can visually adjust each segment by clicking on the bottom left corner of the wav file and adjusting the decible level with its personal slider. Since we were under a time crunch, we were able to to visually set the wavs to be about the same level and then play it through and adjust the gains as needed when we heard it. We also added a touch of warm hall reverb to the vocal tracks which added a lively dimension to the song. We did not have time to mess with the over all mix of the song but I feel like we fixed a lot of the main problems with the tracks and started to make it musical. I am excited to learn more in this manner because I feel like a lot of it really sticks with me when I learn hands-on. Maurice said that we are going to do a lot more mock sessions like this past one and eventually, help with real projects. I'm amped!
