First recording session!

I'm excited to write this blog to tell you all how well our recording session went today! Well, as you may know from previous blogs that I was performing two songs (Coldplay - Charlie Brown and U2 - With Or Without You) for this recording session. I decided to change one of the songs from Owl City's 'Vanilla Twilight' to U2's 'With Or Without You', this is quite simply because I preferred this song and for me, I found it easier to play therefore, I felt this was more suitable.

Firstly, as a group we went and got all the equipment to set up with and used our floor plan to set up the microphones into the position me and Alie decided on. We made sure that everything was neat and tidy and out of the way and then went into the studio to get everything set up. After the studio was set-up I went into the Live room and had a little practice before doing the actual performance to make sure I was all warmed up and ready to go. Setting up the studio and mics in the live room and the warm up took about 45 minutes to do.

When recording the two songs I was quite nervous but took my time and kept a nice tempo with both the songs. I was impressed that I didn't mess up as much as I thought I would. I messed up a note or two half way through Charlie Brown but that's the extent of the faults.

Once they'd finished, I went back into the studio with my other group members to listen back to the recording and mix it down and add effects. However, whilst listening back through the tracks one of our team members decided he'd 'finished' doing his work and didn't bother helping out any more. Me and my remaining group members stuck together and mixed down and added effects to the recordings as we had plenty of time left to do so. As we had two microphones for the piano it gave us two tracks so I EQ'd one track on the second song With or Without You with Alie and Adams help and get their opinions on how the recording sounded, if it needed anything taken away. Alie then EQ'd one track and added compression on both of the tracks. 

After this I EQ'd both the tracks on Charlie Brown whilst Adam went on to add compression to both of the tracks and also giving me and Alie tips on what we should take away and add when EQ'ing the tracks. 

I found this fun experimenting with the different effects on Pro-tools however, we decided to keep the tracks clean instead of adding a loads of effects as it had some nice natural re-verb and everything sounded nice and clear. 

Screen shot of us mixing down. 

Myself mixing down some tracks. 

Anyway a quick review on the positioning of the microphones and how well they performed for us!

Just to say we were very impressed with the outcome, it was clear with a very small bit of ambiance but was easily got rid of with the EQ. The positioning was near-on perfect however the Behringer B5 microphone did respond maybe a little 'too well' to the high end of the piano and we had to take away a huge amount of high-mid and high frequencies. Other than that the C1000's gave us a nice clean, clear image of the sound paired with the B5. 

Thanks for reading!

Chazzy!

Mic specs and frequency charts...

As a group we decided on two microphones to mic up the piano. The two microphones we chose were one Behringer B5 condenser microphone and one AKG C1000S condenser microphone.

 We decided to use two condenser microphones for the piano because they are far more sensitive compared to a dynamic microphone and therefore will pick up a vast amount of detail. This will benefit us because a piano is quite a delicate sounding instrument and a condenser microphone will pick up all the small details that will ensure we get the full picture of the sound to work with when mixing and mastering. 

We chose the Behringer B5 microphone for the higher end of the piano and the AKG C1000s microphone for the lower end of the piano. We decided this because the Behringer B5 microphone is more responsive in the higher end of its frequency response. However, the AKG C1000s microphone is reasonably responsive in all areas throughout the frequency range. From previous experience we know that the AKG C1000s microphone is good at picking up delicate sounds as we used it to record an acoustic guitar.

The standard 88 keyed piano has a frequency range from 27.5Hz (A0) - 4.2Hz (C8). 

The Behringer B5 microphone has exchangeable cardiod and omnidirectional polar patterns. A polar pattern is a graph showing whereabouts a microphone picks up from. A cardiod polar pattern means that the microphone will pick up from the front of the microphone only. The frequency response for the Behringer B5 is from 50Hz - 20,000Hz. 

The above diagram is showing the frequency response for the cardiod pattern for the Behringer B5 microphone and the frequency response chart.

The omnidirectional polar pattern means it'll pick up from opposing sides of the microphone however, this will be no good because were focusing on one area of the piano with this microphone. 

The AKG C1000s microphone ranges from the same as the Behringer B5 mic (50Hz – 20,000Hz) and is a reasonable frequency response throughout the frequency range. However, as stated above the piano's frequency range seems to be a lot lower than what the microphones are able to pick up, but this will not effect us as only the mid-range and high-mid ranges of the piano will be used. 

The above graph shows us the cardiod frequency response chart for the AKG C1000s microphone and the frequency response for the AKG C1000s microphone a meter from the sound source, this is showing us that the frequency response is reasonable the whole way through the frequency chart. 

I'm missing one picture so far of the cardioid polar pattern for the AKG C1000s but that will be added very soon.

Thanks for reading,

Chazzy!