Recording Zeno in the Sennheiser Studio Theatre
Thought I’d just write a quick post about a project that myself and Alex Pegington took on a few weekends ago.
For his Major Practical Project, Alex is recording Leeds based trio Zeno. The band have quite a rocky influence and for that, Alex wanted to get a huge drum sound, something which seems very difficult to achieve in the other studio’s live rooms as they are fairly dead. He decided to record the drums and bass in the Sennheiser Studio Theatre as it is a large room with quite a nice natural reverb.
I was roped in to help Alex set up the mobile recording rig and mix monitors for the band who were all on in-ears. For this we took an LS9-32 and split the lines to take a feed for monitors and to the preamps in the Pro Tools rig. This was a bit of a pain, due to the tails of split having different connectors, meaning we had to run the monitor feed through 50m of multicore to have the right connector for the tails! This was a bit of a pain as the gear was all right next to eachother. Noisy monitors it was, as we continued the set-up.
Alex and I had spent the Friday evening setting up the tools rig, working out digital issues, failing with 25pin Dsub connections and going down the ADAT route between the 192 interface and a set of Focusrite pres. After managing to get 21 channels into tools (using 3 external pres), we were happy that the system was working correctly and would be pretty plug and play on the Sunday.
Sunday arrived and we began by gathering all the gear. Set-up took a lot longer than expected but we had the whole day and night to record so we weren’t exactly in a hurry. After getting the kit set up and sounding sweet, sticking the guitar cab in a remote room, and the bass cab in-between two sets of curtains, we were ready for some takes!
It was at this point I discovered/remembered about the LS9′s ‘Custom Fader’ layer, which allowed me to have all my inputs and mix masters on one layer, which made things easier when monitoring the individual mixes.
A bunch of hours later, we had 5 tracks laid down, and when I left for the night, the guys were getting ready to overdub some guitar parts.
All in all, a great day. Was good fun and I’m now fully confident about the Pro Tools rig, which puts me in good stead with preparation for my Classical Recording assessment taking place soon at the Philharmonic Hall.