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Demo recording – an update

By skamonic

As we’ve explained we need some new demo tracks, and we are now half way through producing three new vocal tracks to complement our largely instrumental CD.

At the beginning of January we did the trickiest bit which is recording drums, thanks to Mark’s mobile recording rig. We also laid down the guitar rhythm track, and added a guitar solo to one of the tunes.

Since then we have been slowly building up the rest, and have now finished the recording phase.

After the drums, the next track to be added was the bass. This was relatively straightforward as Nigel can do this with his PC. It’s not as portable as Mark’s rig  but is perfectly capable of doing single tracks.

After that Nigel recorded Veronica playing keyboards and singing, and did a rough mix of the full rhythm section plus vocals ready for the horns to overdub.

The final recording session took place yesterday when the horns crammed into Nigel’s dining room to add their parts. This required a lot of careful planning.

First we had to move furniture around so that we could fit three players in. We’d love to record the whole band together as if we were playing live as that would catch the proper Skamonics vibe. But that is too much of a technical challenge as we don’t have enough kit ourselves to do this, nor do we have access to a large enough room suitable for recording a seven piece line-up.

But we were determined to record the horns together. Adding them one at a time would simply not have worked. It’s vital that the horn players can play off each other. All the nuances that come with any instrument that you blow need to be caught together. It’s not just a matter of playing the right note at the right time, but of how you accent a note and how long it lasts.

Second we had to drape the room with duvets, bits of acoustic foam and Rockwool in order to dampen the acoustics. There is always a danger that instruments recorded in small rooms sound boxy. Just as the great long reverbs you get in concert halls or churches can sound gorgeous, small rooms can sound nasty.

Thirdly we had to really well organised as inevitably we did not have enough time. If you don’t know about recording, you may find it hard to believe bands can take days or weeks recording a single song. Anyone who has done it knows exactly why. There is so much that can go wrong, and always the feeling that just one more take will deliver the perfect recording.

We had just over four hours with everyone available in which to record three songs worth of horn parts, add a flute overdub to one song and capture a sax and a trombone solo for the other two.

And we needed to video one of the songs, as we are trying to make a video of recording of one of the songs.

This was a challenge.

We weren’t helped by the headphone amp that decided to start distorting like crazy, nor by computer crashes, but we just about got everything done. Everything behaved fine when recording single tracks, and in a technical run through the day before,  but not when we were under time pressure.

But there were still a few wrinkles. Steve played a brilliant solo, but neither the good or the just about all-right video cameras were running, only the cheap and nasty one. So we will have to work out how to cover that up in the video. The moral of that is that you can’t engineer a recording session and video it at the same time.

Nor did we have time to listen carefully through to everything to check that there aren’t mistakes or odd fluffs that we did not notice.

Now the hard work of mixing and video editing starts.

This takes hours. Mark is mixing two tracks, and Nigel is doing the other and the video that goes with it.

Getting a decent sounding mix is both a science and an art. While we have no need to resort to the kind of Autotune trickery that some singers need to sing in tune, there’s still a lot to do to get a recording to sound half-decent so that all the instruments fit together smoothly. Even though we’re aiming for a fairly raw and natural sound as these are meant to promote our live playing, there is still a lot to do.

Perhaps we’ll post in more detail about the mixing and mastering stage, when we’ve done that.