Recording an Acoustic Album

This is a snapshot from a side project, which has been consistent for the past several months.  I’ve been recording a local Las Vegas band called Chug-A-Luv, while they’ve been recording an acoustic EP.  While that causes a relatively simple set up, their arrangement is what’s most interesting.  As far as instrumentation goes, there is one guitar, a tenor saxophone, two vocalists, various percussion instruments, and a djembe as their acoustic drum.  They record all original music that ranges from comedy to jazz-rock.

         
 The guitar was recorded with a Neumann U87, the saxophone with an AKG C-414, and the djembe, because of its design was set up with a 414 underneath the sound hole of the drum, one 414 overhead, and a SM57 on the skin of the drum.  That was the way we could most fully capture the full tone of that drum, and was one of the hardest parts of the mixing process as well.  Some difficulties were faced when recording vocal harmonies at the same time, as so comb filtering occurred because of the closeness of the vibrations.  The only way to resolve that was to re-record those particular vocals, which were effected. 

           
For processing on each track I generally added a compressor, an EQ, and a very cool tube warmer plug-in that I have.  Because the djembe consisted of three tracks, getting the balance between the attack on the skin of the drum, the bass from the sound hole, and the depth of it from the overhead.   With a couple nice plug-ins it was quite easy to get the vocals to punch clean through the mix. Then the difficulty is getting the bands natural dynamics to shine through the mix.

Foley and Sound Design: Night of the Living Dead:

Two quarters ago I was a part of a group project whose goal was to completely gut an old Royalty Free film, and rerecord the entire film over again from scratch.  My responsibility for this particular group project was to do all of the Foley work for the project, which was quite a lot to take on for one person.  I began my process on the project by watching the original film two or three times to really understand how it sounded originally, which led me to think of how to make this project better than the original.  After my viewing sessions I started filling out dozens of pages of Foley notes, breaking the film down sound-by-sound. 

When I finally started recording I needed some help from my fellow group members to efficiently create the sound effects.  There were certain aspects of the film, which I would not have been able to recreate in an outdoor environment, even though it would have been preferential to do so.  I wanted the cleanest audio possible so I could change it how I saw fit later on. This is where I had to be very creative, so instead of recording live grass without the video from the movie, I used different kinds of plastic bags for the grass in the film.  After recording these bags I put these footsteps through many different EQ’s and pitch shifters to give the bags a more realistic sound. To record all of the walking in the film, whether it was on wood, carpet, rocks, or plastic bags; I used 2 Sennheiser MKH-416T Shotgun Microphones. Those microphones were recorded straight into Pro Tools, either through my personal Mackie ProFX12 mixing board, or the schools SSL Duality console.

Other things I recorded to help bring the piece to life were things such as distinct clothing movement for each character, a time consuming process but it is necessary for the piece to seem truly realistic.  This was continued in my work by using different kinds of leaves and brush for the movement of trees in different scenes.  My classmates and I broke different kinds of glass for several different scenes of the film as well.  During scenes where characters were killed we got to have fun making their deaths more gruesome than the original film.  When the character Johnny dies by a head injury I layered the sound of a sand bag falling with a hand punching the same sand bag and a foot stomp. With some careful EQ work, some compression and adding some extra bass in with Wave’s R-Bass plug-in I successfully created a nasty crush, which draws viewers into the scene.  One more example of some of the creative things I had to come up with was for scenes with characters being stabbed. 

To create one I used an apple and a small pairing knife.  I stabbed the apple a handful of times to prep it, and then recorded it once its juices were already almost on the surface of the apple.  I layered that sound with the scraping of a trowel, and one more sound in that design was a wet paper towel being squeezed out, which created the perfect squish.

This was one of the most involved projects I’ve been involved with and to see it truly come to life at the end of the project was amazing to see.  All of the fine details involved in creating this piece, from the actual foley work, to the signal processing, and ending with automation and mastering the project taught me a great deal about the post-production process.