recording sessions
yesterday i finished recording the song i’ve been working on with local artist carly henley. we recorded the final guitar and vocal tracks in a tech room that we reserved in one of the libraries at the university of washington. the recording went well. we ended up spending about 4 hours in the room, which was exactly how much time i had anticipated. the setup took about half an hour to 45 minutes, guitar tracking took a little over an hour, and vocals took about two hours.
i took advantage of a couple of widely used tricks in recording guitar and vocals, especially doubling. acoustic (and often electric) guitars almost always sound better when you record the same guitar part on two different tracks, and hard pan them to opposite ears, so the first guitar only comes out of the left ear, and the second only comes out of the right. this trick quickly covers any mistakes made in either performance, as well as filling out the stereo field, and giving a fuller feel to the guitar. it i surprising how much better a guitar part can sound when it has been doubled and hard paned to either side. the same can go for vocals as well, when used in the right settings. choruses are often doubled, and sometimes entire songs have doubled vocals. the only problem with doubling vocals, is that unless you want the doubled sound to be obvious, it takes a lot of work to get the two tracks to sound similar enough to create the right effect. this is why most of the time that vocals are doubled it is only in the chorus, giving the chorus a distinctly different feel than the rest of the song. it gives more power to the vocal, giving the chorus more significance when used in that context.
i also wrote a harmony for the vocal part that i think turned out pretty well. recording vocals is always a challenge, and is always different every time you do it. new challenges come up every time and each artist needs different encouragements in order to bring the best performance out of them. it’s always interesting recording vocals for that reason. carly has a great voice, a very mature tone, and usually stays on pitch really well, even with the difficult melodies she writes, but she had never really sang harmony before. she is used to singing the melody, and she especially had never sang harmony to her own voice. i enjoyed working with her to get the best performance for the song. overall it was a great session, and i’m really excited about how the song turned out. as soon as it’s mixed i’m sure it will be up on her myspace, and i’ll be sure to let everyone know so they can listen to it. for now, it’s off to mixing so i can move on to the next project.
