Project Pre-Production - 'the Si Holmes Band'

Last night our production group went to Newquay to watch the band/artist we're using for our project play live: Si Holmes. It was definitely useful to hear the full band version of the song we've chosen, in contrast to the acoustic demo he gave us last week.

We're recording the track on Wednesday in order to create an interactive video to accompany it, so I'm making as many notes as possible, breaking down the song's structure and intrumentation and coming up with a few ideas of how to layer the song and any ideas I'd like to discuss or try out.

I've also been looking through my old books for any tips or new ideas. Especially as the song (entitled 'Africa') has an African feel to it, which is something Si want's to experiment with during production, so I'm looking up on recording and mixing any instruments or percussion types that I haven't recorded before, eg Bongos and the like.

There are three of my books I usually consult before (and during, and after) the recording process; 'The Recording Engineer's Handbook', 'The Mixing Engineer's Handbook' and the 'Pro Tools 8 - Music Production, Recording, Editing and Mixing' handbook. The first two are great for tips and advise on how to record practically every instrument and how to achieve the sound you want, and the latter is useful for executing the process well, especially as I still have a lot to learn about Pro Tools. There's also Wikirecording.org, a really useful site containing masses helpful information that's always good for inspiration/experimentation.

The backbone of the band is relatively straightforward though, just drums, one guitar, bass and the vocals. I've already begun listing and annotating the recording process I'll use for each one, what microphones I'll use and in what position. The most difficult part that's much harder to prepare for is how we're going to finalise the stucture of the song, what other instrumentation or percussion we're going to include and what effects or production techniques we might decide to experiment with, all things that happen in the studio during the production process, mostly due to impusive experimentation (and short attention spans).