Update: Mat's guiar recording session

Mat's recording session

Acoustic guitar

The second recording session that I took part of was as an assistant for Mat Quinn in which I helped to set up the equipment for recording acoustic guitar or his track. We first moved he acoustic drum kit as well as any equipment out of the way so we have a comfortable space for Mat to record his guitar as well as enough space for the microphones to stand without getting knocked by anyone, which could ruin and disrupt the take.

Once the space was cleared we set up the seating position for our performer that he was comfortable with we then set up the microphones around Mat which means that we can set them up optimally for our performer as well as for tone, we were using two SM57's one placed a the sound whole and the other at the neck and ran them in protools, we also used a SM58 for a talk back mic which when used in conjunction with head phones allows us to communicate clearly without any miscommunication.

There was only a few problems that we encountered, first of which was trouble with XLR cables for the microphones, due to them being just worn out with constant use which meant that they needed replacing to make sure that we had a good quality recording. The next issue that arose was a problem with Protools, when we were recording the audio in a stereo track with the two mics it would cause the left mic, which is placed at the fret board to become incredibly quite, to fix this we had to work around it and record the mics in two mono channels one for the left and one for the right, this was a pragmatic solution, by meaning what we did worked but it then requires a little more effort to get it to sound completely stereo, meaning to sync both tracks up perfectly otherwise there will be problems which can be heard immediately. The final problem that we encountered was with one of the rotary pots on the desk itself, top left, as it had a loose connection and would not allow us to properly level the audio, to fix this our engineer used a Digi 003 to increase the gain on input one to properly level the audio. One thing that should be noted which is an issue that occurred when recording the guitar, was that a compressor was needed for the recording as it goes from loud to quite regularly and that it needed to be evened out, I do not believe that this is necessarily a big problem as it is quite common with the style of playing Mat did for his track.

Overall I feel like the session went extremely well everyone was in a positive frame of mind and worked hard, we managed to get the sessions recording done, with all the problems, in a relatively short space of time without rushing and getting great quality recordings with plenty of tone for Mat's track, we then carefully packed up what we had used and left

Thanks
Dan