Well today’s been a pretty productive one (no pun intended). 9am start, and finished at 5pm in the John Marley Centre studios with local band, We Beat The System for our last project in Year One of my production degree. I didn’t have a terribly active role, but I still contributed and enjoyed my time today.
I Was largely responsible for setting up and overseeing the recording of the bass tracks, and providing occasional creative input when necessary. Collectively, under the command of Producer James Hall, we successfully manages to lay down the bass on all four songs, and we had started on the guitar tracks too. We chose a dead space for the bass to be recorded in by locking the amp and bassist in the vocal booth, and we provided a nice open space for the guitarists by tracking them in the live room, in the hopes of capturing some of the room ambience.
Although I didn’t have much input, the decisions that were made around me had a great influence on my own thought processes. I have already got in my mind an idea of how my mix of these four songs will sound and I look forward to making a start on it all very very soon!
Somebody told me today that this blog is a great idea to inform people of what to expect should they want to go down this route. Well, what you should expect when starting out is that you may not always have a terribly active role during the recordings, or that you may not always have a terribly creative role but if you stick at it and approach everything with a creative outlook, it will pay off in the end. For example, my role in this project so far has been as part of the backline crew, but thanks to what happened today I KNOW I can make these guys sound the best they have ever in their time as a band. And that is the biggest reward :)
In other news, my new monitors have been shipped, and I am currently looking at getting myself some business cards printed. I am focusing lately on networking, and the more contacts I have, the further I’ll be going in this business. Everything’s looking good :)
