Music vs Technician - week 3.

On November 22nd we went onto our 2rd week of activity in our 5 week plan of trying out every role in the music buisness, and this time my band and pod 6 were the studio engineers for the pod 4 'Oceans of Apathy'.

I had spoke to the band the day before and aksed what they needed in terms of equipment, were they going to record each instrument individually? or a live lounge session? They informed me they would be doing a live lounge session.

The following day only 2 members of the band were present from the beginning, throwing out the plan for a live lounge session. I spoke to lewis and callum and asked them what they wanted to do, and they told me they already had drums recorded with a guitar guide track. They decided to record bass and guitar over the drum track today but just as we were about to set up, rowan and dev turned up.

I then spoke to the 4 of them and they confirmed Tim wasn't going to be in, however there was a bit of tension between them as Dev said the he didn't record the drums and that the rest of the band had steve come in and play. Myself and Nathan then said for him to record his drum part as he shouldn't let somebody eles play his part in the band. Myself, Nathan and Millie went into the live room to begin micing up the drums for Dev to record himself and it was at this point that the rest of the band came in and said they wanted to do the live lounge session.

Now finally knowing what we were doing for certain this time we began micing up the drums, guitars, and bass. After we had done this we went back into the control room and I began listing what mics were on what channels coming through the patchbay while Charlotte and Nathan set up Cubase ready to record. We had a few technical issues that Phil came in and sorted out for us and finally we had everything ready to go.

Mid-way through our first take the band suddenly stopped playing for some reason and after asking why they told us Dev wanted differant cymbals as he didn't like the sound. After heading into the live room with Nathan and changing the cymbals over we were ready for the 2nd take. I left to make a phone call to work, and when I returned they were halfway through a take and everything sounded great. We finished the take and they were happy with it. Nathan then exported the file and we went in and stripped down the live room and put everything back.

Final thoughts:

I think the session went very well all in all, however I have 2 main points to bring up. The first is that the band were late and we were informed in the session that the singer wasn't coming in. From a professional standpoint this wasn't good enough. The second point was that we could have been much quicker If we could have sorted out our tech issues faster.