Recording Seizure

I’m doing the mixdown for the ACT CD tonight. Yes, on a saturday night, how sad. Good thing is it should be finished tonight… except for one thing. (Be warned, this gets pretty technical.)

When we recorded it I really experimented with a number of methods. Firstly I used my MP3 player to record from the line out of the digital piano at rehearsal. This gave me what I had hoped would be a clean piano track. Unfortunately, I had left the input level too high and it blew out a little, but I used it anyway for a number of tracks. Other tracks I played on my acoustic piano live with the recording of the vocal. This is less than desired usually because the spill of the piano into the vocal mic makes redubbing vocals afterwards a bit messy. None the less, we did do this as we were both sightreading, and it was multitracked into Adobe Audition, a program I’m pretty comfortable in. It has the added bonus of automatically trimming your stereo mixdown to the regions which contain audio tracks, no matter where they lie on the linear time plain. This just saves you cutting out all the mis-starts, then having to group all the tracks together to retain their alignment when you move them to the start. Mixing down was very fast.

Now I’ve moved onto the last few tracks we did in Cubase to take advantage of a piano soft synth I was experimenting with. This was a mistake. I am no where near as comfortable in Cubase as I am in Sonar or Audition, which slows me down, but also there are idioms of the program I don’t like. The soft synth is a nightmare, slowing the mixdown process from a few seconds to 15 minutes thanks to the piano rendering. I would have been much better off tracking the acoustic piano live, or taken a mono mix of the digital piano (I have only two mono inputs available when I’m working in XP).

I’ve recorded a wide variety of recordings with my own equipment from my radio play to many rehearsals CDs, plus five or six demo CDs for singers and even an audio book for children. I have serious limitations. Something I need to address is the monitoring situation. Headphones are realy the only way to work when the mics are together with monitoring, and a headphone amp would be excellent. My mixer configuration is also very odd because it lacks inserts (a seperate output for each mic channel), and as I use it for mic preamping, the main outs and even effect sends are taken up by one mic signal each, making things very awkward. Of course, I make do with what I have. Being a recording engineer isn’t something I want to dedicate the rest of my life too, but I think the ability to record and produce your own material is a very valuable tool. But of course, I’ve got to actually write something to take advantage of this.