The extras and the overdubs are the extra bits of audio that can potentially increase the dynamics of the song. This included things like guitar solos or extra instrumentation or backing vocals.
Electric guitar solos and noodles
To record the solo electric guitar parts, the guitarist played through a VOX amp which we used an SM57 microphone was directed slightly off centre of the speaker cone. this is to eliminate some of the bassier frequencies and capture more of the high end.
Like the acoustic guitar, we set up a room microphone and the sound barriers to pick up the reverberation of the room and to eliminate any unwanted room sounds.
While doing a recorded dry run, we noticed that the sound of thee electric guitar was too sharp and to piercing so we reduced the treble and increased the bass and mid settings. With this the guitar still sounded rather acoustic like so we tried changing the pre-set effects to give it a little more distortion and gain.
Once we selected a good enough effect and we got the headphone mix right and we started recording.
Piano and strings
To add more dynamics to our track we added piano. This was a simple set up as we just recorded it line in to the input in the wall which is fed directly into the desk. We adjusted the gain level and set up the headphones so Sean could hear the entire track. We did a couple of practice runs and then went straight into recording. When we listened back to the entire track we unanimously decided that we needed strings on the musical break to calm the song down further so we changed the setting to strings on the electric piano and recorded the strings the same way.
Harp
Part way through the recording process Abigail brought up the fact that she played the harp and we all thought this would be a fantastic addition to the track. Recording a harp was new to all of us including Luke so trial and error and being experimental was our most useful tool at this point.
Abigail told us her harp had a jack input to plug into amp or in our case the desk. We did this and listened back and thought it wasn’t quite enough so we set up an AKG 414 directed at the strings at around the mid to high end of the harp which was where Abi was plucking. we thought this would fill out the sound and give it more of a realistic feel to the harp sound.
After making sure she could hear everything through the headphones, we set the gain and started to record. the only issue we faced was we had to maximise the gain to hear it due to the soft nature of the instrument. once the levels were boosted it sounded beautiful, soft and calming which was a great dynamic during the beaks in the song.