We had a lot to record for the overdub week. We started by recording the guitar solo as without it there would be a large, boring instrumental break. I was playing guitar and after setting up the amp (high gain, high mids and lows, slightly less treble to avoid string noise) I ran through the part on loop as it was particularly difficult. We used two close microphones on the amplifier at the same distance (SM57 and an Electro-Voice RE20) and an AKG 414 as a room mic placed opposite the amp (set to omni-directional for room sound).I had to use a punch in for the last part as it overlapped and we recorded two takes in order to pick between the best executions of each lick.
We also re-recorded the lead guitar part as we were not happy with the one from week 3. For this I used the same amp settings as the solo.
Next we recorded keyboard; here I was able to get behind the desk and work Pro tools with Panashe. First we found the right sound on the electric piano and then ran it through the DI into the patch bay and then into the desk. I set the gain levels, pressed the “line” button and turned up the short faders into pro tools at the right level and then listened back with the long fader. We recorded in stereo using two jack leads, one for each output. We encountered a problem with a buzz coming into pro tools; we realised that the sound was coming from the keyboard itself and found that adjusting the volume made no difference to the buzz so to remedy this we simply set the keyboards volume to max and then reduced the gain on the desk. Increasing the signal to noise ratio like this got rid of the buzz.
Lastly we recorded backing vocals; for this me, George and Panashe all went into the dead room to record around one microphone. We encountered a problem where our headphones did not reach well enough but we simply moved closer to the headphone output. We used an AKG 414 with a pop shield set to omni-directional to capture all of our voices equally. After looping the chorus and practising a few runs we recorded together.