Sunday gone, for the princely fee of a slab of beer to be arranged on some future date, my mate Bill and I agreed to record some tracks for an up-and-coming Manchester band called The Void. There might have been three engineers on the job but Gaz was a casualty to the St Patrick’s Day celebrations. Just as well he didn’t come along – it was cosy enough in the studio without having to deal with toxic fumes from his night out.
Recording a track is a lot trickier than it looks. You have to set up a complex studio, manage the band and keep your wits about you. The drums come first. You have to set them up in a dead-room (No echoes – imagine the sound in a wardrobe full of clothes and you’re not far away.) Then you have to mic up each drum in such a way as to capture the right sound. This means selecting the right mics for the job and angling and routing them so that they doesn’t impede the drummer’s playing style. Not so easy – have you ever seen a drummer flail around? You give the drummer a set of headphones and play him a click track, which keeps him in time, while recording all of the mics through the mixing desk and into Pro Tools (a hard-drive recording system). You do take after take ad nauseam until you get it right!
When this is done, you get the next musician in and repeat the process. So the bass player replaces the drummer, and plays his pieces while listening to the drum track we’d just recorded. Then the guitars, and finally the vocals.
We spent ten hours solid in the studio and managed to get everything but the vocals done. It was a hard day for the musicians and even harder for the engineers – when they went home, we carried on the work in our own studios, processing and cleaning up the audio ready to do some mixing down (the process of turning the individual tracks into a coherent song).
Bill and I are still working on the audio and probably will be for a week or so. The vocals will be bagged next Sunday in one of the better studios and with some really nice microphones.
Sound Engineering is very cerebral work. Months of training are coming together nicely and everything kind of just slots into place when you’re at the controls. Although, just as with most skills, anyone can learn engineering if they want to, to be a good engineer you have to have a fundamental and deep-rooted understanding of the principles of sound and a trained ear. The former requires a sharp brain, and the second lots of experience. We’re working on the latter. )