Recording original band High House at Alive Network HQ Recording Studios

I started recording High House on Sunday 13th February at Alive Network Recording Studios.  This band is the first original band I have recorded at Alive Network.

High House have six band members who play a wide range of instruments including the banjo and accordion.  Their music is very folk based and this was very exciting for me, as this style of music is right up my street.

The band arrived on the Sunday and we started to record the drums.  For guide tracks we just used acoustic guitar, vocals and bass.  Kieran (drummer) was just using brushes, and for one track just mallets.  This meant I had to ramp the gains of the pre amps up and use slightly more compression than usual.  The brushes he used were metal and the sound was amazing.  It really suited the style of music they were recording.

When we started the first track I noticed that the drums didn’t really feel right and kept pushing and pulling with the click track, so we changed the tempo by 2bpm.  I then asked Kieran to try and relax into the click track more, and almost play behind the click instead of on top of it.  The track then came together and it was sounding superb.
 
We recorded a total of four tracks, all of which were really catchy and well-written songs.  We managed to get the bass tracked on the same day, and for this Jack (bass player) used his lovely sounding Fender Jazz Bass.

Here is a list of mics I used when recording the drums and guide tracks.

The following day we started to track the acoustic guitar.  For this I simply placed the SE Z5600 mic in front of the acoustic, around the 12th fret.  I put the mic really close to the guitar because the songs are quite soft, so I wanted that close intimate sound.
 
After Dan (lead vocals, acoustic guitar) had recorded all his guitar parts, we then decided to track his vocals.  Dan is one of the best vocalists I have ever worked with because his pitch and diction was pretty much perfect, and he has a lovely rich tone to his voice.

It was then Tom’s (guitar, banjo) turn to put down his parts.  He first recorded an acoustic guitar on one of the tracks and this part was slightly different from Dan’s (singer, guitarist) acoustic guitar, so I panned one hard left and the other hard right.  This gave the mix a really nice stereo spread.  He then used the hollow body Fender Telecaster into the Cornford valve amp.  I added lots of reverb because he was after an airy, spacey sound to sit in the mix of two of the tracks.  We got the perfect sound for the tracks.

It was then time to record the banjo!  This is the first time I have ever recorded a banjo and I thought the SE mic would sound great placed close to the body of the banjo.

We recorded the banjo on two tracks and once they were mixed in with the acoustic guitar the songs started to come together.

The only instruments left to track now were keyboards, accordion, violin and glockenspiel.  James (keys, accordion) started by recording his keyboard parts, which didn’t take long, then the accordion, where I placed the Neumann in front of the sound hole.  This sounded great and gave a really nice warm texture to the song.

Laura then recorded her violin parts on two tracks and also a glockenspiel on two.  I used the SE mic for both of these because I love the high end of this mic, and I wanted these instruments to sound clear and smooth.

The backing vocals were the last to be recorded and these went down in no time at all.  The tracks were now complete.  We listened through all four tracks and everybody left that day really happy with what we had achieved.