Recording Studio Documentary

Today I went to one of Rosemary's rehearsals. It was the first time I've heard her play with her band and I really liked the sound of what they've put together. They played the full version of Hieroglyphs (which I recorded an acoustic version of and shared in a previous post) as well as two other complete songs and a few that are still works in progress and I'm really excited to get started on producing them.

We booked the studio for a week today and I've started making notes on my microphone choices and how to structure the recordings. It's a big project, with drums, guitars, bass, piano and four vocal parts, and the band were keen to record live. However, I'm less keen on that, with bleeding between instruments making it difficult to control the mix of the recordings as well as being limited to 16-tracks/microphones with the analogue mixing desk, when I tend to use around 15 on just the drums.

So I'm trying to figure out a way to make the band perform as comfortably as they would in a live environment but with the same result of multi-track recordings. Ideally, I'll get the drums, guitar and bass to play together in the live room but route the guitar and bass through to the amps in the two isolation booths. I'll have Rosie in the control room singing a guide vocal at the same time. Then record the piano and vocal tracks separately afterwards.

Grant - the editor and assistant cameraman on our current project - asked me if he could take some photos or do some filming so I approached Rosie with the idea of making a mini documentary/making-of to edit together. She seemed enthusiastic so I asked my friend Alex - also on our course and good with his DSLR and interesting in music production - whether he'd be interested in helping out too, which he was.

The idea is to make it into something useful for Rosie as well as ourselves for our PDP work.