Recording the guitar tracks

For this track, we decided to record two acoustic guitars playing different variances of the chords to give it more of a dynamic feel.

To do this we placed one guitarist in the live room and the other in the dead room. This was to separate the 2 different sounds of the guitars as we decided as a group that we were going to try and record them both at once to save time.

Set up on the guitarist in the live room:

We chose two microphones to record the live room guitarist which was the Sure SM57 and the SEZ200aII.

When recording an acoustic guitar, the closer you place the microphone to the sound hole will give it more of a bassier sound equally if you direct the microphone higher up the fret board you get a higher treble sound. So we directed the SM57 to the 12th fret of the guitar to pick up a nice mid range.

We also set up the SEZ200aII at the other side of the room to capture the reverberation of the room opposed to the direct sound of the guitar. The reason we used the SEZ200aII was because it had a changeable polar pattern which we set to Omni directional and a low shelf setting which we left on for recording this guitar.

Because we were using a room microphone, we placed sound screens either side of the guitarist to dampen any room noise that may be present.

Set up on the guitarist in the dead room

The set up on the second guitarist was very simple as we only DI’d this guitar. We did have an issue when doing this which was the battery had run out on the guitar which would allow to capture the sound so we had to go down to media loans to get one which was something that should have been checked prior to the recording process. When testing the quality of guitar in the dead room we could not here any sound. we found this odd as we had just changed the battery so we started checking we had done everything correctly within Protools and within the gain structure process. We then identified the problem as being the simplest one to rectify. We didn’t turn the DI box on… this was a learning curve which we will learn from next time we DI something.

So both guitarists could hear what each other was doing and to hear the track, we patched the headphones through to each room. We did have an initial issue with the track not being heard in the dead room but this was rectified by adjusting the amount of sound was going to the headphones. He also couldn’t hear much of the other guitar so we patched through more of channel 6 to ensure the guitarist heard all instead of just some of the track.

Once all the issues had been resolved we started to record however whilst playing the guitars sounded out of tune however we realise this was due to Rob playing the song in the original key opposed to the changed key 1 full tone up or 2 frets higher than the original.

A few mistakes occurred including one guitarist dropping out to early before the bridge so we had to use the pre role so the guitarist could listen back and join in before the mistake to again keep the dynamics of the song and to get it in time with the rest of the song.

One issue that I noticed while mixing the guitars together, was that the strumming patterns were slightly different which made it appear out of time in certain parts but I will mention about this in further detail within the mixing process.

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