My friend and I( like I told you in pt. 1) had recorded for almost a whole summer even through a couple hurricanes 5 years ago! What we recorded was good instrumentally all around just lacking in the vocal area, not that he couldn't sing he just liked to push the envelope of his range and tried to sing a little too high at times.
So my friends house is a 2 bedroom/ 1 bath with a smaller sized living room c but big enough for a sofa and a love seat with a tv stand comfortably, connected with a small sized kitchen with a throw rug in the middle of the room....I caddie cornered the walls with blankets to control some of the reverberation, and set up a couple microphones, keep in my mind I'm only recording an acoustic guitar, and plans to record a bassist direct in and had plans on recording a keyboardist and violinist after all the Vocals, Guitar, and Bass tracks were complete.
Alright so the first song we record is called "Roses" we lay the click track down to the tempo of the song and drop the guitar tracks immediately. Satisfied with our takes, I then take one of the mics used on the guitar and set it up facing the corner of the blanket set up.
Oh...I left out a major factor when recording anything outside of a treated envirement.... NOISE. My friends house is conveniently located on a busy street leading to a park and 100 ft. diagnally across from a BUS STOP!... the low frequencies from passing cars are bad enough but a bus?! So we didn't even get through the first verse before I cut it. That's when I started thinking outside the box ON THE FLY something Audio Engineers are trained to do. All the forums I read and discussions I had in the past 6 years, one of them being about Vocal booths I can't remember where I read it or who I discussed it with....THE CAR!! The next best thing to a treated vocal booth or a treated room in any case.
I had enough mic cable, the only things we needed to get the ball rolling from the beginning was a headphone cable long enough to reach from the living room to the side of the house, a mic stand (FOR THE SECOND MIC ON THE GUITAR), and an extra pair of headphones so for less than 100 bucks I believe we're doing a whole album.( let's not mention time away from wondering how rent's getting paid next month)
LUCKILY my friend's brother, another good friend of mine has a Mercury Marquis the big body style. He let us borrow the car no prob. I'm not going into detail how I set the mic up but let's just say I had ZERO noise floor!! And it was later that evening so less traffic was driving by which allowed us to finish the vocals with no problems for not just "Roses" but "Nation Wide" things are looking up because we had to pick the bassist up at 8:30pm and we then had 2 songs complete!!
The bassist is classically trained and a musical genius a real "studio musician", it was an honor to even have him want to drop bass on my friends songs (sincerely he really believes in the songs and rehearsed them for a week str8 every nite till 3 or 4 am) at no cost!! (at least upfront)
So the bassist came in ready, very well rehearsed and dropped both baselines in less than 2 hours. I'm gotta say my friend is a singer/song writer for country music is jewish, the bassist is black and plays for a church and a hip hop band, and I'm puerto rican/sicilian very into hip hop myself and rarely ever listen to a country song in its entirety!! So we're not your average Jim's...
The bassist after we finished tracking said he was kind of nervous in the beginning but he felt like he knew me for years by the end of the second song, I laughed it off but to me thats a compliment being a aspiring producer. Naturally I try to provide the best vibe possible to get the artist to give me the best performance possible...
Satisfied with our work that night we decided to celebrate a new beginning by having a few brews at the ale house, well deserved. Let's keep in mind I touched down Monday the 14th of July and tuesday night is now over.... My friend and I dropped more guitar tracks that night for another song we worked until 4 or so wed. morning. I love my career too bad it doesn't pay the bills all the time but for me I do it for something way more priceless than money....MYSELF
GBEATS
WWW.HIPHOPPRODUCTION.COM
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