This trimester I undertook 3 freelance projects, which included two ep’s and a single from three different artists.
The single was a rock song called “Unsettled” that had a very high track count. We used as many microphones as possible to cover all the aspects we needed too. This was a blessing and a curse as we had some great tracks but committing them the 32 outputs on the large Audient has a challenge. This was out even compensating for FX returns out of pro tools. Recording drums could have turned out better by paying more attention to mic placement and taking care of bleed before hitting tape, but the final result was usable. As for everything else, the tracks were high quality and the only other thing could’ve worked on a bit longer would be vocals. The client was very pleased with the product and showed interest in future sessions. As the song had already been written there wasn’t really a producer role to be filled, rather just the engineering and mixing that need to be done. I brought my knowledge of mixing metal and rock tracks to the table which help smooth the process.
I and two others also took on the engineering behind an EP for a three-piece blues-jazz band named ‘Fearless Monster’, which was four tracks long. We were given the job of capturing the band live, which took place in the large audient. We mic’d the drums in the far corner with the guitar hidden behind a baffle next to the stage box of the live room. The bassist was sat next to the door but not running his bass through a cabinet. We only captured the DI and mixed it with an impulse response feeding out to the band’s headphones. We had set up stereo rooms, equal height in the middle of the room. This I believe was a fail, as the stereo image wasn’t balanced so instead, I created some fake rooms running most of the tracks through a reverb and blending it in with the dry tracks. Bleed from the other instruments was minimal which helped with gating the drums later on. The band's performances were very tight and sat well dynamically which made our job easy during our separate mixes. The band was very positive when listening back to the tracks during mixing as the live sound created o nice open feel the songs. As with the rock song, the songs had already been written leaving us the engineer and capture the tracks. The group in which I work was very dynamic in terms of music tastes and mixing styles and so with all of us invested to make this record sound great the best of each of our skill sets contributed to the overall product.
The last EP was for a solo act by the name of ‘House of Anderson’ who also had their song written only needing to be recorded. His style was quite freeform only consisting of mainly acoustic guitar and vocals, with some overdubs of mandolin and mandola. After tracking the EP, I was very interested in one of the tracks called “Go Live Some Life and Learn”, which has quite a catchy chorus melody, the song's instrumentation is only acoustic guitar and vocals. But the harmonies during the chorus are well thought out and serve a harmonic foundation to fill out the sound. The electric guitar was tracked for this song but I don’t think it was needed as it seemed to clash with how the song was written. The artist was very pleased with the tracks he had left with. He wasn’t too worried on us mixing the tracks as it was his wish to mix them himself.
Overall my freelance performance this trimester was active and produced some very good tracks, I definitely will continue to track more artists in the future being it where I love to spend my time. I like the engineering role, especially when working with high-quality songs and musicians. It makes my job a lot easier and everyone has more fun. I know this won’t always be the case, but it’s something I will work towards to make happen more often.
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