A few weeks ago, my band was fortunate enough to be selected to record one of our original songs at a professional recording studio, through the ‘Kool Skools’ program. This opportunity was given to bands from my school who played an original at our Battle of the Bands.
This experience was great experience for my band, Scry, to have a chance to record our sound, and to (soon) be able to share it with others. We are a four piece melodic rock line up, and have been playing together for almost two years. With seven original songs currently written we plan to record an album in the form of a story if we get the chance in the future.
Before recording myself, I had always wondered what the recording process for rock songs actually entailed. For those interested to read on, I will outline what the experience is like.
My band is in the interesting position of being a four piece rock band, but only having three current members. I myself play the drums, Tim plays the guitar and Andi plays piano and sings. Our search for a bassist may now (as of only this week) be over, but at the time of the recording, we had no bass player.
Tim decided he would play both the bass part and the guitar part to the song we were recording. Obviously, he could not do both at the same time, so we entered the realm of multitracking.
There are two main ways of recording a song. The first involves the whole band playing through the song and all parts being recorded, with later some overdubs (solos and harmonies) being added. The second, multitracking, involves building the song up from scratch, one (or few) instruments at a time.
The most important part to a recording is the drums. Once the drums are laid down, all other instruments can record to the drums and be in time for the recording. It is near impossible for a drummer to record over the top of a guitar, or any other instrument, and play well in time.
As I recorded the drum track, I had a click track, with heavy syncopation, blaring in my ears. What this sounded like was a constant ‘ping ping ping ping’ going back and forth across my headphones. It was quite helpful for keeping in time.
As I recorded the drum part, Tim was in the drum room with me, recording the bass. By being in the drum room he could lock in with the bass drum and get a nice sound for the rhythm section of the song.
After recording the drums and bass, and fixing up mistakes (along with guide vocals by Andi, to get him warmed up), we all moved to the mixing room and Tim recorded the guitar parts. To do this, he went through the song once, just playing the basic chords (and this take later got panned to the right), and then went through the song again, playing the basic chords with licks in between phrases. This created quite dynamic effect and was not something we had planned on beforehand. The mixer who worked with us (his name slips my mind) helped us out by giving us ideas such as double tracking the guitar, without being to intrusive into the song itself.
Next, Tim overdubbed his guitar solo. He had three takes to do this, and we experimented with distortion versus no distortion. In the age of digital recording, deleting takes, using part of one take and part of another, and recording from any spot in the song is unbelievably easy.
Finally, the vocals were recorded on top of everything else. The nature of the song had no need for double vocal takes or harmonies, meaning our recording was done.
The song itself was not. Recording a song is very much a three stage process. First, there is the writing of the song (which is a whole post in itself), followed by the tracking (discussed in this post). Afterward, there is the mixing, by which all parts are matched to one another to sound like a complete product.
We received our recording only a few days ago, months after making the takes. The mixing process takes quite some time.
With exams less then three months away, and most of my time taken, this is one of the most interesting things I have done over the past few months. With no WoW (and no gaming at all actually, except for some Halo 3 at an Open Day I went to.. long story), there is not many gaming related things I can say.
Except this. To all of my friends who have been non stop talking about Starcraft 2 for the past few weeks, while I’ve been studying like crazy, I hate you all. I’ll be there in a few months!
