Update: Alex Dudley's session

Meet the engineer

The third recording session that I took part of was as an engineer for Alex Dudley's session in which we recorded live drums again, being the audio engineer was a new experience than before as it is the first time doing that specific role in the studio for the Alex and the group. I felt that as the engineer I was pushed a little more than before, because in previous sessions I have been the assistant many times now and the producer once, all have varying degrees of difficulty but often in different areas which can take a short time to get used to.

In the session went we encountered a few problems, the first of which was when setting up the drum kit we were missing the snare for some reason, when we searched for it we found what appeared to be a different one altogether, to resolve this problem we asked Harriet about it and we were allowed to use this new snare, fortunately the new snare had a much greater tone to it and it really helped out with the audible aesthetic of the track.

The next problem that we ran into was a missing memory stick in which contained the backing track so that our performer could play along to it precisely. Fortunately we were able to resolve this Alex Dudley had to borrow someone else's memory stick and go up to the library where he could download a copy of the backing track from Google drive, to make the best use of the time we continued setting what else we had to do while Alex was retrieving his copy. He later found his memory stick and all was resolved.

Overall the session went very well and we manage to record the drums in 3 takes, all of which we different to each other but obviously were still well suited to the track that Alex was creating, this is good because it Alex to be able to chop and change between tracks should he desire to, it also shows that we have gotten to the point where even with quite large set backs we can set up, record and pack away perfectly in no time at all.

I felt as the engineer I did a great job as I was able to set everything up that needed to be in the correct order as well as being able to level and record the audio in with no problems and I was also able to utilise my communication and team working skills when talking to all of the team, which therefore allowed me to get the best out of my self as I was able to do what the producer wanted with out any miscommunication and mishaps.

Thanks

Dan