The recording session went very smoothly for the most part. Ross & Katee had consistently excellent takes. We ended up doing 3-4 takes per part, but in most cases the second was already usable. At one point Katee noted a delay in what she was hearing back in the headphone mix, which we determined was due to the buffer size in Pro Tools being set to its maximum by some previous user, so we corrected it down. I’m glad we were able to track that issue down quickly.
I was unaware that Ross had wanted to do two electric guitar parts, so we made an additional 3 tracks in Pro Tools (for the 2 microphones and 1 DI signal) for that part to live in, but it generally went smoothly. This did, however, shift my view of the song’s instrumentation; Ross was playing both the main riff in the original ABBA tune, as well as covering some of the elements that the keyboard was playing. So this added to my decision to not overdub a keyboard part myself, which I had been considering.
Daniel was an excellent assistant. I had chosen him because I knew he was quick with troubleshooting on the Audient console. At one point, we could hear the click track coming through the monitors when it shouldn’t have been, and he was the first to suggest that it might be coming through the headphones in the live room, which was true. There was an extra set of headphones plugged in from the last student’s recording session, and it was turned up quite high, so we were hearing that come back through the stereo microphones used on the acoustic rhythm guitar. Having a second brain working through the signal flow when we’re on a tight schedule and that kind of issue comes up is invaluable.
The vocal shootout was between the SM58, AKGP420, and Rode NT2. We all agreed (Daniel, Katee, Ross & I) that the Rode NT2 sounded best, which was good. Looking back, I’m not sure what I would have done if there was disagreement on which sounded best. I’d either have to make the decision to choose what sounds best to me as the recording engineer, or go with the artist’s preference. I think it would be wise to form some kind of personal policy for that eventuality.
During his first rhythm guitar part, Ross said he thought he had made a mistake at some point, but we listened back to it together and he said he couldn’t hear it. Will listen for that again during the editing stage (spoiler alert: I end up finding it. I’m glad i noted it in this log, because it was very subtle, and if I hadn’t been looking for it it may have slipped past).
A week after I wrote the log above, I went into the Audient with Daniel as my assistant once again. It was a very easy session, with just setting up hihat snare and kick as described in the last log. We reduced the snare’s ring by putting a cloth bag on top, because in the reference track there’s very little ring to the snare.
The only issue I had was a matter of time; I didn’t have enough time to practice this drum part before needing to perform it flawlessly, and the result was a less-than-flawless performance. Also, it didn’t help that I was trying to play really rapid 16th notes for long stretches of time, early in the morning. I either needed more coffee, or a later booking time in the studio. But all things considered, it could have gone worse.
Recording bass was similar; I would have liked to have had more time to learn to play the part, but it wasn’t nearly as challenging for me as the drums; I play bass far more often than drum set. I actually quite like the bassline.
In shifting my perspective back from performer to recording engineer: Tonally, drums and bass sounded good, all the levels were where they should be coming in, and the artist was a real pleasure to work with.
Regarding editing, this was a straightforward process with comping the different takes, noise-gating the drums, and using beat-detective to make the drums tighter. I used a strength of 85% on the drums to get them really tight, per the sound of Pop sensation ABBA. The electric guitar part which only plays intermittently got the “strip silence” treatment. Vocals got a similar treatment but manually, to remove the major breaths (and some of the minor ones on a case-by-case basis). Looking back, all of the vocal takes were usable. Katee was a remarkable performer, the kind that just gets everything perfect every take. I didn’t need to spend as much time on trying to comp in the perfect phrases; it made it more difficult that they were all so similar, so picking the best one required a lot of listening. I could have just used the 2nd or 3rd take all the way through and saved a lot of time.
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