Band Recording: 6 April 2007
Posted April 23rd, 2007 by DomI’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, and finally decided to.
On 6 April 2007 (mark this in your DF journal) we stepped into the recording (dance) studio and did our first ever recording. Wanna know how hi-tech it was? We used mini-discs.
The way Rich Bitch works, they have a professional recording studio, where you can pay about £400 for 10 hours of studio time to get proper recordings. Or, you can hire the Dance studio for the standard price (£12.50ph) and record for free to your own minidiscs. So thats what we did. We booked our normal 2 hour slot and went in armed with a few discs. You can ask the technicians to come and set your levels right and then start the recording. So we got the man in, did a run through of Russia, and let him adjust the sliders and dial and switches that make us sound just like U2. There is even a Bono slider for the vocals. Weird.
Anyway, we pretty much just went through the set a few times over, took a few takes to get it right but we did each song about 10 times so we came out with a good few trials. The session went quite well. It was cool to play on a stage, with a full rig, and monitors, and the room was really cool too. Very hip (or whatever is the cool word the kids are using)
Anyway, recording was the easy part. Since we recorded to minidisc, the trouble next we getting it from MD to my laptop (I took charge of this fun task). I did some searching and found the only way was to do it through a line -in port and a 3.5mm mini-jack. So that meant recording in realtime. So I set the thing to record, hit play on the MD player, and buggered off for a while.
A bit later, I had 3 .wav files recorded in Audicity, that I could play with. I brought them into Logic Express and just used the cut tool to snip around takes of songs, then dragged them to a track for each song. This meant I could easily export all versions of one song in one go.
After tediously listening to the whole thing (almost 2 hours) I had split the tracks. They were then exported to wav files, and i used a open source program called Max to convert them to MP3’s, and finally, imported into iTunes and set the ID3 tags. Phew!
The only problems with all this is, the recording level was low so the songs are all really quiet (at least the raw tracks), and its all as one track, in mono, so can’t do any adjustment of each instrument. To be honest, I thought the bass should’ve been louder, and I didn’t like the sound much, and the guitars were a bit loud. So some tweaking needed.
Anyway, some of those tracks are now up on Virb, and if you really want, you can have the raw wav files, and can do some editing of your own. A challenge for any amateur music producers. See what you can do. email us at douglasfurs at googlemail dot com for info.
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