Recording Portfolio

Between my degree and freelance work I have recorded a wide range of sounds for all sorts of projects. Here you will find a few examples, some with fairly conventional instrumentations, and others featuring much more unusual sound sources. More information can be found with the individual recordings, and should you require higher quality renders, the full resolution mixes can be downloaded via soundcloud.

Band Recordings

While not the most conventional instrumentation, probably the best example of my band recordings would this playlist of tracks from the Free Nelson Mandoomjazz album The Organ Grinder, which I engineered and mixed during the first half of 2016.

These tracks are taken from a double album that was recorded in around four days in the Reid Concert Hall in central Edinburgh. As you can hear, I was required to capture a wide range of genres and instruments, ranging from celest and baroque pipe organ to a drop tuned bass guitar through a cranked Sunn PA head and Orange cabinet, all while working to a very tight schedule and with somewhat limited resources.

The Reid Hall was chosen both for its pipe organ and for its incredible reverb (both of which can be hear particularly well on Om), and in order to capture the sound of a band playing in this space as closely as possible, all instruments were recorded together, with minimal overdubs. The drum kit was place in the centre of the stage, with three timpani behind it. A pair of Schoeps omni mics were placed either side of the timpani to help reinforce their sound and to act as close room mics for the rest of the drum kit. AKG 414s were used as overheads, and together these four mics formed the bulk of the drum sound. During the production of this album I read an interview with the drummer Gavin Harrison where he descriped recording the drum kit as like recording a piano, in that the combination of elements resonating together are what give the instrument its sound, and being overly reliant on gated close mics will quickly lead to an artificial and clinical sound. This influenced my approach to drums on this, and subsequent recording sessions and lead to a much more musical sound to my ear. The drum sound was rounded out with two Sennheiser MD421s for tom mics, a Shure SM57 for the snare and a blend of AKG D112 and Electro-Voice RE20 on the bass drum.

The saxophone parts were all recorded with a Neumann U89, as were all trumpet parts, with an RE20 used on trombone parts. A plexi wall was used between the horns and drums in order to maintain eye contact between the performers while also removing some of the bleed from the drums into the horn mics. However, it was positioned in such a way that both the horns and drums would blend before reaching a pair of room mics (a second pair of Schoeps omnis) placed at the far end of the hall, effectively acting like a reverb bus for the entire band.

Rounding out the core sound of the band, the bass guitar was recorded using a pair of D.I. boxes; one with taking a clean signal and the other running through a Boss bass overdrive pedal. A blend of these signals was then sent back through headphones for monitoring during takes. By recording the bass parts this way we were able to make decisions about the blend of signals for each section of material after recording, saving the limited time we had access to the hall for tracking. The hall also only has a 16 channel loom, and limiting the bass to two channels during takes allowed more space for other instruments. At the end of the session the bass parts were re-amped, sending them through a Sunn PA head and an Orange bass cabinet, with the room and timpani mics left in their original positions to give the bass parts the same reverb characterists as the other instruments. The cabinet was miced using an SM57 and D112 as close mics and the 414s as close room mics in front of the amp. Its position in roughly the centre of the room meant that the drum mics picked up the rounded bass sound from behind the open cabinet while the main room mics captured the full spectrum, and the careful blending of all of these signals, along with D.I. signal created a massive bass sound; essential with the bass being the main harmony instrument for most of the album.

Finally, a selection of other instruments were used for specific tracks on the album. The piano on Calcutta Cutie was recorded using a pair of DPA omni microphones hung under the piano lid, the U89s as the main stereo pair, and the standard room mics to give detail and a little noise from the hammers for character, while keeping a soft and dynamic sound and the hall’s reverb. The intro for this song also features a celest, which was recorded using the U89 pair and room mics. Again, the instrument’s natural sound in the room was near perfect and so simply putting up a pair of mics was all that was required. The percussive parts that go along with the celest in the intro were just the sound of drum sticks agains the side of the wooden stage, picked up using the drum overheads and room mics. An orchestral bass drum was used as a compliment to the timpani on one track, and was miced using the drum overheads as a spaced pair, the timpani mics to capture the beater sound and the bass drum mics placed just in front of the front skin to get the deep resonances from the drum, along with room mics. The last instrument used in the session, and possibly the most iconic was the pipe organ at the back of the hall’s stage. The drum overheads were extended up and angled to face the organ’s bass pipes, acting as a close stereo pair to give detail to the sound and a wider stereo image. The timpani mics were used as a medium distance pair, capturing the main reverb sound and most of the ghostly saxophone sound on Om. The room mics at the other end of the hall were mixed in just enough to give a sense of perspective on the scene and, moving their level up and down allowed the focus to shift from the organ to the saxophone and back.

The tracks above were mastered by Michael Fossenkemper at TurtleTone Studio; but if you would like to hear unmastered versions of the tracks to better assess my mixing, please get in touch.

Acousmatic compositions

This is a collection of compositions that were written during the final year of my degree. It is roughly 20 minutes long and does not feature any synthesized sounds, traditional instruments or samples recorded by other people.

The first piece, ADSR, features a wide variety of objects, including springs, a broken amplifier valve and a watch. The second, Cubism, is almost entirely made up of sounds from a Rubix cube, though features other things with a similar timbre. Finally, 60 Minutes of Car Crash Victims, incorporates environmental sounds, along with noise from broken instrument cables and convolved screams.

ADSR was made using ProTools 10, using a combination of stock plug-ins and the GRM Tools suite. Cubism and 60 Minutes were both created with Reaper, stock plug-ins and freeware reverbs and compressors.

For more information on the compositional aspects of this suite, click here.

Soundtracks

This is an example of a recording that had to be made on a tight schedule with limited equipment. In the course of a day the entire piece was recorded, mixed, shown to the director, re-recorded, re-mixed and mastered, using (almost) only one microphone.

While this track features a prominent guitar track, it was also an opportunity to use the skills I acquired recording sources for my acousmatic compositions, mainly the ability to record things other than the traditional guitar/bass/drums/vocals. The main percussion in this piece was performed with foot drums, made out of a typewriter case and a tambourine, which was tied to the musician’s left foot. By placing a microphone wrapped in a sweatshirt inside the typewriter case, a fairly convincing kick drum sound was produced upon stamping on the case. A shotgun microphone from a camera was used to record the crack from the stamp and the tambourine sounds, and combined the two feeds gave a punchy, yet clear rhythm section.

In addition to recordings I have occasionally worked as a live sound engineer, and between the two I have had to find ways to get usable sounds from, among others: bagpipes, banjo (sans resonator), saxophone mouthpiece, 1920’s “trap” drum kit, tenor guitar, and a drum kit made out of furniture.

Soundwalks

As part of my degree I recorded a series of locations in Edinburgh in order to create a “Soundwalk”. The idea is to give the listener the impression of the ecology and sonic landscape of an area through recordings.

Each of the stops in this playlist, named after their locations, captures a different aspect of the journey I took from the city centre out towards the Botanic Gardens. Obviously, I could not make these recordings with a normal microphone->soundcard->computer setup, and so, after experimenting with DPA lapel microphones, I settled on a Zoom H4N. The DPAs produced clearer results, but were difficult to protect from wind, and while taping them to a hat in order to create a near binaural effect was interesting, it resulted in odd sensations if I accidentally looked around during the recording. Very little editing was done to the recordings produced by the Zoom, as any manipulation would give an unrealistic representation of the locations. However, I feel that these recordings demonstrate my ability to capture the character of a sonic environment purely through good microphone technique with fairly average equipment.