Recording Week!

So week 4 has rolled around very quickly. It's time to record our lead acoustic guitar which is the standout sound of the song no doubt.

Upon hiring out our equipment for the session, a suggestion was given by Mel (from tech) to use a Rode NT2A aimed at the bridge of the guitar and use a Rode NT5 aimed at the strings. She said it gives a nice warmth the the recording. So we ended up getting both the NT2A and paired NT5 pencil condensers and trying them out to see which sounded better.

In the studio we set up a Pro Tools session at a sample rate of 44.1 and a bit depth of 16. We then inserted 2 mono audio tracks, which were then panned left and right respectively.

For this test run, as seen in the above pic, The left mic is the Rode NT2A aimed at the bridge of the guitar and the neck mic was the Rode NT5, aimed at the 12th fret. The artist was given a click track to the tempo of 129 bpm (same as ref track). We tampered with the positioning of the mics trying to get the best sound, but thought it best to swap out the NT2A and replace it with the other paired NT5 to see how it sounded also. The paired NT5's ended up sounding clearer to us for the particular sound we were going for and ended up using them to record the final guitar recording. Unfortunately during the haste of the session, I forgot to get a picture of the final mic placement of the paired NT5's.

The segments recorded for the track were a verse and a hook. They were then copied and edited to construct the rest of the song. The artist then had the recorded guitar played through his headphones to do some improv to be used in the editing/mixing phase of production.

All in all the recording session was a success and we believe we got the desired sound for the project. Next session will be to record the rythm clap of the project, and also finding and sourcing a kick that blends well with the song.