In February I had the opportunity to do a live recording with the Wedding and Events cover band Scoonie Brae. This came about after making a request via Facebook for musicians and bands to make contact, of which Grant Jack the keyboard player from the band made initial contact. We arranged a meeting and then a date for a recording.

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Scoonie Brae are a "Fife based" covers band catering for the Wedding and Events scene working from songs of all eras, such as from the 60’s with Lulu to modern era with songs by The Stereophonics.

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The setup involved for the recording was one mostly based on DI interface boxes with the use of two synths and a digital drumkit, each one requiring two DI boxes to pickup the left and right channels. The experience I gained from Sound Production Practice helped me in my setup of these instruments. While guitar, bass and vocals using Microphones.

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In the case of the guitar this was recorded using an SM57 and an MD421 combo to produce a mix of different sound from the guitars amp, while a DI was also connected to provide a clean backup recording. The bass guitar was setup with an ATM25 Mic based upon the experience gained during sound production practice and Multitrack Mixing. While vocals were recorded with the AT4050 Mic set to Cardioid, again also picked up from sound production practice.

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The challenge that I found from this recording was to make sure all the recorded sounds were of a good level, as the band wished to play together rather than do their segments individually. Overall this worked and there were no major problems due to good sound isolation, although it was noticed within the quiet sections of the vocal recording the sound produced by the digital drum kits heads being heard. Thus something learnt from this for future recordings is to record these separately, as the sound produced by them live is not what is picked up by the recording session. These were cleaned up in post-production so did not impact the quality of the recording in any way.

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Health and Safety requirements had to be considered as well before recording could start, thus safe cable routing between the mics & DI boxes and the control box was made sure of by routing the cabling in such a way that they were in a neat order and thus minimising the chance of any trips. Also as well, the Fire Exit door was kept clear so that easy access could still be maintained in case of emergency.