Anatomy of a ZomBOOsical
Part Two: Recording From Afar
Sadly, I live in a different place to John, Moe and Hilden. Very different, over 4,000 miles away different actually. I really wanted to keep an active involvement with the ZomBOOsical after heading home and we’d already tried musical collaboration over the internet before with the Shmopera and it worked surprisingly well.
So how does it work? Well more often than not I’d get a mail or something from Hilden with an mp3 of a rough track that they were working on with some vague ideas of what they need on the guitar and what bpm the track would be set to. As luck would have it, Hilden and I both use Logic Pro on the Mac so our process for recording and mixing is very similar, which made the process a little smoother. On top of the direct emails, I’d be chatting with John on a pretty much daily basis via Skype, MSN, Email and Facebook chat to keep up to date with what’s going on and input the occasional idea here and there.
My thought process for recording was to provide Hilden with as dry and raw a sound file as I could so that he could easily edit and mix later on to fit with the other things he had. This can be quite a difficult thing to achieve, you want to provide enough EQ to give direction to how you think it should sound but not enough that it limits or forces the mix in a particular direction. Electric guitar is also fun given that you’re generally talking about adding a truck load of different effects to get ‘that sound’ so another balance to hit for example was ‘how much delay and reverb’.
The way I approached these issues was to create a rough mix with all instruments included as a reference point to a) where my parts should be time-wise and b) a rough idea of how I’d mix it. That’s mainly where things sit in the stereo mix, how much effects I’d go with a rough EQ pass. Following that file I’d send each separate audio track with a small amount of EQ, minimal effects and no stereo mix.
One of the things that I wanted to make sure that I captured with the actual performances when recording was the ‘recorded on the spot with minimal thought process’ feel that we had from the first session. Thankfully, the way I approach recording guitar melody/lead work is to set the section I’m working on into a loop, hit record and improvise for a few runs. From there I’ll either find one of the performances that I already love or listen through them all and pick out the bits that I think worked and record what I call a Frankenstein Track, all the bits I like stitched together.
As a treat, here’s some of the guitar work that I did that didn’t make it into the final tracks…
