Weekend Recap: Little BIGSOUND & Annie J & Fusion

Hey!

My plan with this blog was to do a studio recap of the recording session I had on Sunday, but my entire weekend was really awesome in terms of pushing forward with my career as an audio engineer and as a musician - so I'm going to combine it all for you!

So firstly,

Little BIGSOUND

I had a really great Saturday attending the Little BIGSOUND conference at the Edge in Southbank!

It was awesome to catch up with some familiar faces, but also I feel I've taken a lot away from the day in terms of my perspective of where I'm at with the Jbox project; and where I'm taking it next.

One of the biggest things that it all boils down to after all this industry knowledge and types of strategies and marketing - of course all of that is super important - is that it always comes back to the song. The artist and the music is the core of what it's all about, and without a strong product all of the logistics and innerworkings behind the brand probably shouldn't be worried about.

I've learned how important it is to be happy and confident with my music, and to really enjoy what I'm doing before anything else. Doing the networking and gaining all these tips within your community along the way is crucial, but I know that I just need to keep doing what I'm doing, get better at songwriting and keep pushing towards a stage where I'm really content with the music I'm presenting to my audience. I guess one of my main goals in this, is to become a truly authentic artist; so that when I do get to play BIGSOUND in the future I have a reason to be there on stage. As I continue to develop my sound and skill up in theory, audio engineering and discover my community - I know I'll get there.

Some other really important stuff I gathered on the day was the strategy behind social media marketing and planning releases. Vanessa Picken, who is the director of Comes With Fries, did an excellent crash-course in digital marketing and the types of services she provides for artists.

I had about 5 A4 pages of notes written down by the end of it, there was just so much good info in the talk; and it proved to me just how much strategy there is when it comes to online presence, releases and developing your brand. It also made me realise that I need to start being much more patient with my music. I tend to finish what I'm working on and just want to get it out there as soon as possible; but there's so much more that happens 6 months prior to a track going live. In a future blog, I'll go into way more depth about how I'm taking the information I gained onboard and plan to integrate it into my brand.

Neve Studio session: Annie J & Fusion

So I've finally jumped into the studio with one of my main projects I'm undertaking at the moment. Stefan has been a legend and in the previous two sessions which I was unable to attend, everything on the EP was completed except for the vocals, sax and keys.

We had the entire day booked out on the Sunday, and we smashed it out. The pace we worked at once Annie and ourselves were in a rhythm was blistering. It was very much a professional recording session, it felt great.

Stefan and I juggled roles a little which demonstrated our flexibility and skills in the studio environment, however my main role for the day was operating Pro Tools and setting up the live room.

For me, I was quite stoked at the end of the day at how much I've improved in my PT skills considering I've been an Ableton user for so long.

In terms of performance, and having to coach our artist that we were recording; we were really just blown away and really admired the skill and professionalism that Annie provided us for the day. When talking to her from the desk, the main things we did was just making sure that she felt comfortable at all times - and making sure that we maintained a steady momentum. We all knew when a take was a keeper; and once Annie really got into it, she started one-taking everything and we were on fire. All of this coming together allowed us to fully complete the recording of the EP by the end of the session. It was a lot of work, and initially we were a little uncertain as to whether we'd finish it - but 40 GBs worth of session data later we did it!

For our mic setup, we went for a lot of options. Really, the day also doubled as a session of high-end microphone testing!

So we had an AT 4081, a Royer 121 and a RODE NTR side-by-side to capture the saxophones; along with another NTR further back and standing higher than the close mics to capture a little bit more of the room ambience. For the vocals we used the Neumann U87, which is the arguably the best vocal mic we have available to us at SAE - rarely sounds bad with anything, industry standard, bullet-proof choice.

Once all of that was set-up, what was our workflow like for the day? Firstly we did the keys for the tracks since it was still morning and wanted to give Annie's voice a rest until after lunch, since she had played a gig the night before. Stefan brought in one of his old Juno synths, and we DI'd it via the back of the console. We used a clean but funky organ sound, and had the ability to apply a tremolo/leslie whirl effect on the mod wheel.

After the keys it was onto the sax, three of them in fact. This is where Stefan and I realised the the time disadvantage of using multiple mics for the one source. Annie recorded layers and layers of alto, baritone and tenor sax; including harmonies for all three. By the end of each track I'm sure I was scrolling through around 50 channels solely for saxophone layers. But granted, it did sound bloody awesome. I'm currently starting to edit 3 out of the 5 tracks in preparation for our first mixing session this Thursday, and one of the things I'm excited about is figuring out which mics sound the best; or whether we just keep all of them and balance the levels.

In the last hour and a half of the session, we were onto the vocals. The U87 sounded great, and Annie was really in a rhythm with her performance. However, once she started layering harmonies onto her lead vocals - that was when Stefan and I was really blown away. Such a minor element to the track gave the entire vibe a completely new feeling, and suddenly the big picture of the track all came together. It instantly started sounding like we were listening to the original soundtrack from Grease, it was so cool.

~ ~

I've got a ton more updates coming your way with this one, and will have some audio demos ready soon so you can hear the mix coming together.

- Lachy