everyday/everynight tracking

I spent last weekend recording a nine song album for everyday/everynight at home. Everything went fairly well and we were able to track all instruments for every song and three vocal parts for three songs.

We scrounged together enough equipment between Jerad and me to be able to track guitars/keys and drums live. Ryan from The Punch was gracious enough to lend me an Audix drum mic pack, two AKG C451s, and three AKG C460. Two PreSonus Firepods (pre FP10) were daisy-chained together for the interface. Mics got some love from an ART MPA Digital, a couple of the older, noisier Presonus BlueTubes, and an ART Pro VLA. In most cases, this is what was used:

I’ve posted a mic list on RedMinutes for anyone who is interested. The password is mics

We used what we had and got a pretty good sounding result. I was pretty happy with Jerad’s Dragonfly. It was very smooth but still had a nice crispness. Nowhere near as (sometimes) harsh sounding as the MXL 992 on vocals. It fit Jerad’s voice nicely and made a killer guitar amp room mic.

All the tracking was done in Ableton Live 7. I’ve said it before and I’ll stand by it: I think Live is pretty darn quick and easy to track in. It’s not as powerful as a lot of other things and it’s not really tailored toward multitrack recording, but for getting stuff to tape it’s pretty handy.

I did encounter some problems a few times with buffering the samples. On a couple occasions the audio would actually drop out in the middle of tracking. I’m not 100% sure what caused this. It could have just been the speed of the hard drive.

At one point we went back to a song to record the beginning after we had recorded the end with different instrumentation. Somehow I had accidently cleared some audio regions from the session and my Undo history was toast. I had to manually locate the files and drop them back into the project. Part of that final section we had recorded, however, had a punch-in towards the end of the track and I thought I was going to have to adjust the clip length to fit it back in with the original take. That is, until I remembered that Live saves an analysis file² with each audio file in a project, containing information about clip length, Warp, and placement. All I had to do was drop the file back into the project and bump it over to where the original take ended. The clip bounds were exactly how they were after I edited the two takes together.

File management is also pretty slick with Live, as long as you can get used to the concept of Projects. Basically, the Project contains all the audio and analysis files that the “sets”³ within it access. This makes session-wide file cleanup possible in a few clicks. Finding unused audio files does so across all sets.

Live 8 will apparently include some things that will make it a little friendlier to multi-track recording. We’ll see.

¹ Nice balanced sound. Might be a new favorite.

² They have a .asd extension and are in the Samples folder of your project.

³ .als files