SES WEEK 2, SEETING UP AND PRO-TOOLS

This week’s lecture emphasised the importance of planning a recording session in advance, down to the nitty gritty. I suppose it’s obvious in retrospect that to arm yourself with information regarding the number of pieces to be recorded, the instrumentation for each, the musicians names, the availability and type of equipment on hand at the studio and more, can only result in the recording proceeding smoothly and producing a better result... as a result. Some of the information David recommended gathering wouldn’t have occurred to me naturally, particularly: designing the track placement, room placement and recording schedule in advance, but I see the sense of it. I also think that, as an engineer, one would need to adjust one’s research to the scale of the proposed project, ie: there’s not a lot of point in spending hours following a band around at rehearsals and gigs, and pumping them about their favourite beer etc if this same band is planning on spending around $500 to thrash out a 3 song demo in your studio over the course of the day (including overdubs and mix-down!). Common sense prevails (probably). The next part of our workshop involved designing a (band) recording session and setting-up the project in Pro-tools. I’d be happier if there was a projector or something feeding off the Pro-tools monitor as I couldn’t see a damn thing David was doing, however, the software seems (fortunately) fairly straightforward and I’m anticipating having a bash at it.