Here is the low-down:
These are in fact three different recordings of relatively the same song.
- Track one was done live. I don’t know who did it, and with what; I just got the file from the band. I thought it would be nice to have more to choose from. I did not expect much from that mix.
- Track two was also live. I recorded the band as a guinea pig experiment of how well my live recording skills would pan out. Because the band did not pay for the recording, they did not give me much of a sound check, so I had to go with a hit-or-miss setup. BTW, the room the show was in is VERY small, so I had to contend with serious mic bleeding and bad acoustics. Not that I am complaining, just something I had to deal with. Although the bass was recorded direct, it did bleed to other mics. I mic’ed the guitar, but it had too much bleed that I did not use it in the mix, so I used my backup,
a GI100 direct box. That track actually sounded fatter than the mic track. On the drums I used a D112 on the kick, a Beyerdynamic M-422 on the snare, three E604 and a 421 on the toms, and
a C4000B on the overhead. I chose that mic for the overhead because it had a built in pad. I am not going to go into the backup vocal track; it was bad…very bad. I thought for yelling, I might be able to slip by. The lead singer used his sure wireless mic. I wanted to redo the vocals in the studio, but he wanted the live vocal feel, so I did what I could to make it work. If it wasn’t for the instrument bleed into his mic, I may have been able to do more with it. In the end, there were no overdubs. The song was recorded through a Mackie 1604 (House Mixer) and two ADATs. I transferred the tracks to the HD24 and used a PC to clean the clean them. The song was then mixed down on the MCI JH416.
-Track three was recorded by a local accomplished musician in his studio. They used ProTools to record their project. Most of the CD has that technical feel to it. I was not involved with those recordings.
