Setting up

The songs that I am recording/mixing this year are from the band that I am in called ‘The Giveaways’. As I could not get any time in the University sound studio in the Bonnington building we went to Confetti Studios that are located in Nottingham City Centre. So for the recording…
As the drum kit was used in the same room as the rest of the band (in a couple of songs) some acoustic screens were used to try and reduce the leakage from the kit going into the other instrument and vocal mics. We all set up everything ourselves and I even learned how a drum kit goes together! We put the kit into the mixing desk tracks as follows….

Kick Drum	1
Overhead left	2
Overhead left	3
High Hat	4
Snare Top	5
Snare Bottom	6
High Tom	7
Low Tom	8
Floor Tom	9

The Guitar amps used were Marshall MG 200&250 series and a Peavey TKO 115. For the guitars a Shure 58 was placed around two inches away and facing the bottom edge of the cone this is so that the mic does not pick up every single low end possible otherwise the guitars will sound pants. The bass amp was miked in the same manner but using AKG D112. All the guitars were also hooked up with a DI box to patch into the guitars sound before it gets to the amp. This is quite useful as later in the mixing process I can use amplitube process in Pro Tools to give a different sound. The further tracks to the mixer..

Tom Guitar	10
Tom DI	11
Chris Guitar	12
Chris DI	13
Alex Bass	14
Alex DI	15

The vocals also used a Shure 58 to record them so this was track 16 on the mixer. Whilst we were playing our songs we asked (stole) a friend Chris Baines to watch the levels – this was good practice for him as this is his first year at Confetti. Anyway all the tracks were recorded into one session and then saved onto an external hard drive for me to mix/master at home. This was a lot easier than doing multiple sessions as it saved time and hassle on the day. The tracks obviously were split down later and saved accordingly. A few things needed to be re recorded such as vocals & backing and also little lead guitar bits and eventually some midi. These were done in our mini studio in my shed, using the same mics as we did on the day to keep some sort of consistency even if the natural rooms reverb was slightly different.