Empty studios no more

One of my current practical assignments is to record and mix a multi-track recording with drums in them. This can be your own music with someone playing drums over it, but I tought the experience would be much more realistic if I brought in a band.

So I posted ads, went to some shows and got me some contacts.
After a lot of mailing I got "the david vegas project" into my practical night-session, they are a two-piece band, so that seemed a nice way to get into it.

We recorded 4 songs in 2 8-hour sessions, this may not seem a lot, but believe me, it is.
(consider having to solve all the technical problems, trying to get them to play in time, dealing with the band in general, doing guitar and vocal overdubs, setting up all mics and channels, setting up headphone mixes, patching everything in, setting up pro tools, etc etc)

There where some minor problems with the headphones due to interference inside the amplifier (not really our fault, the headphone amp is just rubbish), and some channels broke down on the mixing desk itself, but we managed pretty easily (it's all a matter of running down all 10 possible faulty elements in the signal path :) ).

(action picture, a lot on my head)

(miced-up drums)

(guitarplayer/singer's area and inevitable spaghetti of cabling near connection point)

(guitar cabinet in separate booth to avoid spill)

(sontronics helios valve condensor for vocal overdubbing)


(patchbay to send all signals to the desk and headphones)

On another note,
It's very cold in London at the moment.

(personal ice-walk of death at my doorstep)