Project - AA1

My final project was the recording of a song by the band “Anathema” from their 1999 album Judgement. The song is called “Parisienne Moonlight”.
Having no drum tracks, Amy Sincock did the vocals for me, Nathan Shea played bass and Douglas Loudon played guitars and piano.
For vocals, I used two microphones, a Neumann U 87 condenser and a Sennheiser MD-421 dynamic. The interesting issue was that the U 87 picked up so much reverb from the recording venue (studio 5) and I actually found it quite useful because the reverb plug-ins for pro-tools are not satisfying enough (or at least I don’t know how to get a good sound out of them yet). However, the MD421 picked a pretty much drier sound compared to U87.
I recorded bass through DI. Using Avalon pre-amp I got a relatively decent and fat sound of bass.
For acoustic guitar, I used two Neumann NT5 microphones and got a result of a wide and fat sound.
The electric guitar was recorded using a Shure SM58 and a Sennheiser MD421 microphone. In general, I found MD421 one of the handiest microphones around.
For the piano I used two NT5s and two U87s. The technique of using these U87s was the middle-side technique which provided me with a very wide and good stereo sound.

The process of production was a long story. In most of the cases, to have a wide sound, I doubled a particular mono track and then panned each of these two tracks to right and left. It is also notable that I inverted the phase of one of these two channels in order to get that stereo and wide sound.
Unfortunately, and as a result of me having few experiences in recording, I faced many difficulties in terms of having parts of my recordings distorted or not being able to apply the proper effect n the appropriate time and so on. But the good side of the story is that I learned a lot during the process of recording and production, which would be very handy later.

HERE is my final MP3 track...

These are the documents for this project:
- Pre Production
- Production
- Recording