Andrew and I spend the first couple of years in the studio grafting sessions and reinvesting back into the business, buying hardware/software that might expand the capabilities of the services we offered at the time. During a brief break in covid restrictions Andrew and I ran our first live session together - 'King King - Live at Berkley'. Although successful in many ways the session highlighted some flaws in our setup. We needed to find a solution for clocking issued on 3x adat units, invest in more professional lighting and find a more appropriate solution for headphone monitoring. We spent the following year constructing the core rig of the studio, comprising of: Presonus Quantum 2626, 2x octopre's and a presonus hp60 headphone amp. We picked up some LED panel lights and decided in Summer 2021 to run another session, this time within The Owl Shed.
Andrew had worked with Sam prior to the session and was keen to bring him in to test the setup, I had a week to learn bass for the three tracks due to working on Regressor's album in the lead up. Camera duties were undertaken by Campbell Donaldson. The post production process was done in house by me (Jack) and was an interesting experiment in making a wide sounding mix using mono guitar, bass and full drums. I ended up using a fair amount of Mid/Side EQ techniques to push the mids/presence of the guitars and bass out to the sides of the stereo field and kept the low mids/lows quite central to tie in the drums. It's quite unusual sounding at first but once used to it i think it worked quite well.
Personell:
Andrew Scott - Drums
Jack Davenport - Bass/Post Production
Sam Birchall - Guitar
Campbell Donaldson - Camera
If you read this far, thank you nerd,
Jack Davenport
(N.B from Andrew - Jack's efforts getting bass parts for Sam's material were nothing short of heroic. Also, in so far as taking something basic yet effective and turning it into something musical and full, I feel like this provides an incredible example of something I'm super proud of the studio doing - working with Sam, within the arrangement constraints that we had (guitar, bass, drums) and constructing a real full sonic portrait out of that. I'm pretty sure we took guitar DI from Sam's Kemper, re-amped those bad boys through some Neural goodness and hey presto - instant double tracking and offers a whole lot of flexibility and tonal options without adding potentially cumbersome layering stuff that also can take away from the 'three people playing music in a room together' vibe)
Very interesting article. But you know, I advise you to work on your videos. VHS capture can come to your aid. Completely free, simple and feature rich