The first step in replacing Jarrod’s Reason programming with real instruments happened tonight. Cameron Hissey, not one to be content for having writing an insanely good score for Someone Else For A Day, decides to get THE FAMILY involved by bringing his sister in to the studio. Andrea Hissey is about to start her HSC exams, but took the time out from her (apparently) busy studying schedule to play some cello for me.
By the way, Andrea, happy birthday for tomorrow!!!
We set Andrea up in the main recording space and got her to play a few bars of the
chart. I got a rough idea of where I wanted her microphones to be positioned. We then moved to the smaller recording space –
the so-called drum room of AIM (though I would NEVER record drums in there). The cello sounded ok there too. We couldn’t decide which room sounded better, so we thought bugger it, we’ll record in both.
We started back up in the main recording area, which in the end sounded better anyway. For mics we used a Neumann KM184 about 1 foot away and off to the right of the instrument. The other was the Rode K2 placed about 4 foot above and to the left of the cello – with it’s pattern set to halfway between omni and cardoid. The 2 mics were then blended together in the control room to give me the sound.
Cam had written one part for the cello, but it contained a slightly tricky part where it was alternating between high and low strings. So we decided to record the cello chart four times – two layers of high part and two layers of low part. The layered cellos sounded great.
And then we moved Andrea to the smaller recording space and repeated exactly the same thing.
Therefore we ended up with 8 cello tracks! Once Andrea and Cam had left, I stuck around and cleaned up the tracks, and then bounced all 8 to 2 stereo pairs.
Sounds fantastic. I especially like the section right towards the end of the song, where the band breaks down and there is soaring cello line. It’s a magical moment. Bloody fantastico!!!
As a special bonus for the whole session we hooked up Jarrod via Skype so that he could sit and watch the session from his place in Queensland. It was REALLY weird having a laptop sitting behind you, knowing that you were being watched by someone who was having dinner and a beer about 1000 km away. But it was a fun experience.
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