Capturing The Perfect Take

My team had a great recording session last week with the band "Funk Worthy."  They are a funk/pop/rock group that want to get some material out so they can land some local gigs.  The tune they chose to record was a cover of "If You Want Me To Stay" by Sly and the Family Stone.  The instrumentation consisted of drums, bass, guitar, keyboard, vocals, and saxophone.  We were able to use the new studio F on campus, which allowed for awesome natural drums sounds.  We experimented with using some preamps that we weren't already familiar with, and also opted to route some instruments through some outboard compressors.  We chose to use the Daking 500, API 525, Distressor, and a Chandler Germanium compressor.  The band did 6 full takes, and they are considering some overdubs for guitar and vocals.  They preferred to track everything at the same time rather than pause to fix one players' part.    

The sax player had an interesting setup where he clipped a lav mic onto his sax and ran that signal through a pedal board in order to add some interesting effects to his performance.  We opted to take a DI feed from the guitar player with no effects, and also mic his amplifier with a close up ribbon and distanced AKG 214.  We have plans to reamp the DI signal to see if we can get some cool tones from an amplifier.  Since the bass player didn't play through an amp, we will send the DI signal through a virtual bass amp.  We used great preamps from Vintech, Manley, Focusrite, Shadow Hills, and API.  

The bands performance was well rehearsed and aside from a few minor mental breaks, every take sounded super solid.  One of our challenges was to keep the vocalist up on the mic since he was reading lyrics off of his phone while also trying to see the band, and as a result he would sing into the side of the mic.  Below are some photos from the control room looking into the live room.

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We made a video explaining our mic choice and preamp section.  We apologize for the audio quality, the go pro unknowingly came loose within its case and jostled around a bit.    

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