Innovation and Enterprise - Capture of the Future: Exploring the Evolution of the Modern Recording Studio Design and Concepts
April 2024
Mythological beauty - Big Theif cover
This project was one of my final pieces of work for my degree, The innovation and enterprise module allowed me to interview 4 different studio engineers based at studios around Brighton on their views on how the studio works in the modern age and how it will evolve, I combined the interviews with various academic readings to create a concept for a studio.
I was then able to use the creativity space in the University of Sussex to set up and test the concept studio. For the recording I acted as the engineer with the performers giving me notes of how they wanted the recording to sound. We then recorded a cover of Big Thief’s Mythological beauty in the concept studio and in a standard studio which gave me the ability to compare the benefits in sound of both studios, I also interviewed the musicians and how they felt the studio environment affected their performances.
This project gave me a great opportunity to develop my understanding of studio recording as well as studio design and practice, being able to interview professional studio engineers gave me great advice and insight into developing my craft as well. This project took around 8 months of work and also allowed me to gain experience of planning a project and sticking to a deadline, with lots organization and project mangement skills required to achieve the final report.
Mail wife Recording Session
April 2023
Nightmares - Mailwife
Chips - Mailwife
I worked as a studio technician on this recording session of South London based band Mailwife. Working with Jeremy Joseph as producer, we worked together to create a plan of how we would record the band. We had the band set up in the live room with all band members recording together in there, the band consisted of Gaberiel Lester on guitar and vocals, Lucas Barnett on drums and vocals, Jona Nicholls on bass and Elliot smith on second guitar.
Guitars
We split the guitar amps up placing one in the hallway between the control room and the live room and the second in the dead room which would allow us to get a clean signal of each guitar, in the dead room for the lead guitar we used a SM 58, and on the second guitar we used a SM 57 to make them sound slightly different in the mix.
Bass
For all the tracks the bass was DI’ed directly into the DAW to give us a clean signal. Jona was able to design an amp simulation on logic to get the tone he wanted which was then sent to bands monitoring headphones.
Vocals
For the vocals we used a RE-20 with a pop filter applied to stop any plosives. While condenser mics are more traditionally used for vocals the RE-20 was designed as a broadcast mic and is great at picking up mid-range vocals which we thought would be perfect for Gabe and Lucas’s vocal range.
Drums
We had two set ups for the drums as Lucas would perform one song while playing the kit. For Change and Nightmares, we used a SM 7B on the kick, a 545SD on the snare, and two Beyer Dynamic M 160 ribbon mics for the over heads. When Lucas was singing on chips we positioned the mic near the snare over the kit, this was good ergonomically for him and gave us the idea to try and use the RE-20 as another mic to pick up the snare to give it more presence in that track.