This was the first week were I was not performing so I was working the desk. Before the session began I printed off the lyrics just in case. We recorded vocals in the dead room to avoid unwanted room noise. We tested three microphones (Shure SM57, Electro-Voice RE20 and an AKG C414) to see which best suited our singer (Panashe). The SM57 gave a surprising amount of low end for its polar pattern while the 414 seemed the most clear and intelligible. After the initial test we did another one but over this time over the track; now the RE20 and the 414 stood out the most in the mix. After a final vote we decided on the 414 as we felt it had the most detail and got the most out of Panashe’s voice. We set the polar pattern to cardioid as we were after a direct sound but we avoided hyper cardioid as we also wanted to get the subtle resonances from his body. Then we enabled the bass cut off filter to 160Hz and under to avoid unnecessary low end noise which could cause EQ problems at mixing. Lastly we made sure that Panashe did not stand or sing to too close to the microphone as he might overload it.
The first thing I had to do on the desk was zero the faders from the previous session. From here I set the gain levels for each microphone (enabling phantom power ((48v)) on the 414’s channel. Before we tested the vocals over the track I only had to press the “mix” button and set the input level with the short faders and output with the long faders (once we were recording into Pro tools I turned the “mix” button off). When setting the short faders into Pro tools I tried to make sure that the loudest parts that he would sing were peaking between 20 and 5db. We recording more than one take to allow for variation and multing during mix down. It was also important to keep regular communication with Panashe to make sure he was comfortable and delivering the best performance.
After the session I also made sure that the desk was zeroed.