Alex Ross's Session

So i was the assistant/performer for a session yesterday and to be honest with you we had almost no problems with the entire sessions bar a few mishaps. Our main task was to record drums with Alex as the performer. The first problem we had was that no one had packed away from their previous session so we had to pack away everything else from before, this was annoying but not really tim consuming so we were ready to set up in about 25 minuets. We had a bit of a problem with pro tools as it kept crashing but we got around the problem by using the files that are auto saved inside the pro tools project folder. Once we had everything setup the session went smoothly and we got the drums recorded in quickly and had just over an hour of time left in the sessions so we decided to record some spoken word vocals to later process with neptune in reason. We decided that all of us should be vocalists as this would stop it from being unfair that one person is the one in the track but it was also an advantage because we could pan them and merge them together making some weird effects.

Whats hip n' happenin'

So yesterday i was a studio engineer for Mat Quinn, overall the day went really well and we got the guitar that Mat wanted recorded in really quickly and it sounded really good. We had to strayed off the plan for a few things which i'll talk about now. We had a few problems with XLR cables but that's to be expected. The main problem we had was we were using a stereo track for one guitar as we had a mic on the neck and a mic at the sound hole. The problem we had was, using a stereo track caused the left side of the track which was the mic by the fret board to be really quiet. Instead we decided to use two mono tracks and just mix the sounds together later. We also had to use a compressor because the way Mat's track is played goes from quiet to loud and it was hard to get a constant level from it when there was such a change in volume. Another problem we encountered was the top left gain dial on the desk had a bad connection and would jump up volume so it was hard to level the audio with that but we ended up just using Digi 003 to turn up the gain on input one.

How the session went.

The session started off pretty badly. I re-wired Reason into Ableton but it turns out that you can't record audio in Reason while re-wired. I ended up setting the tempo of Reason to 93 bpm and then dragged in the chords stem that i had previously rendered out. That way i can work around that. I managed to come up with a bass line really quickly and actually managed to get it recorded in 15 mins which is no where near the amount time that i anticipated. After i had the bass i decided to use the Roland Gia synth for a hour which cost me £20. Once i had the GIA i managed to get an additional three tracks recorded which i can place into Ableton at a later date.

Overall, i think my session went really well as i had managed to overcome the problem i had at the start very quickly and then i made use of my time and got more than i expected done.

Recording over the bass.

So I've decided in tomorrows session that I'm going to be redoing the bass. Since college do not have a full version of ableton live suite this is going to be difficult(ish). College do own reason 7 however and I can open my ableton project files but i can't edit or save them. So, I've come up with an amazing workaround, since I can open my ableton file but can't edit it I'll re-wire Reason 7 into ableton so i can get the tempo right and then record and process the bass in Reason.

I have just over 3 hours in the mac room tomorrow so I'll use this to my advantage. I've already got a really basic bass line in the track and i wish to expand upon this. Using the old bass line as a template I'm planning to spend about 1 and a half hours coming up with a nice riff to go under the track, I also want this riff to change through out the track so it's not repetitive and boring. I will then spend around 1 hour playing, recording and getting a good set of takes so I can then use them to my advantage and get the perfect bass line I want. The rest of the time is just encase i end up running out of time doing one of my tasks and also encase something breaks or i have to help someone else.

I plan on using my own bass for tomorrow which is a fender squire but I'm going to be using college cables so that will cost me £20 per hour so I'll run up a total of £60.

I'm going to be using the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 as my USB interface and plugging my bass guitar into that. I'll then use an audio track on reason and leave it unprocessed so i can use ableton to process it at home (because I'm just awkward like that).

I decided to DI the bass because it's much easier to edit the sound in ableton than it is to have an amp set up and record it once and be stuck with that one sound. It's better to be able to change the sound later than it is to try and manipulate a already recorded sound.

So far so good.

So far so good.

So for college, i have to produce a track for an EP. I've been put in a group with all of my mates and we all agreed on an idea for the FMP. Our idea is to have a story told through out the EP, each one of us handling a "chapter" of what happens. The story is of an unfortunate character alone on a space craft but ends up going off drift and all wonder of horrible things unfold right in front of him. My song, will handle part of the story where the character has just come out of a wormhole then ends up drifting into an asteroid belt, unfortunate but i guess that's just what our cruel minds have thought up. I wanted to capture the essence of coming out of the wormhole alive and all of the feelings that the character would be feeling but i also wanted the listener to know that still nothing is going right for our character.

To do this i decided to make a 70's style keys sound and play around with some chords, i then decided i wanted to glitch up some of the sounds but i didn't want it sounding startling. I decided to do this i would need some slightly glitchy sounds throughout the track and i decided to micro edit the kick and snare in places as well as use some weird percussion sounds for the high end, the overall sound was pleasing. I then added some orchestral strings to thicken out the sound, i added some pizzicato strings too just to keep the melody side of the track fresh. I felt like the track was way too robotic so i decided to DI some bass at my house and use my audio interface, i played a very simple riff which ill probably change at some point but for now it'll do. I then decided to do a "drop", i added lots of build up sounds, some beeps and found a nice vocal sample which will do as a place holder, i then made a operator and got a nice bassy sound. To make a more complex pattern i created an audio track and recorded the original track into the audio track , i use this technique a lot as i often create wacky glitched up sounds and this is a perfect way to do it, once i had recorded the sound into my audio track i then cut it up so i could really mess with the sound, i sued some send effects too to make the sound really big. Throughout the weeks i had off from college because i was ill i continued to work on this track and really add to the sound, at the moment i'm happy with how it sounds. Dan Allen helped me with some chord work so it didn't all sound the same, he also wrote a small melody to play on top of certain areas.

Currently this is how my track looks on Ableton. The reason why i have "temp" tracks is because i couldn't get my tracks to work at college but i had rendered out each individual tracks at home so i just dragged them in and made sure they were in sync.

At the moment i am not going to be showing a teaser because it's got to have a lot of work done on it before i am ready to release it to the public.