Today in my Recording & Sound Production class, we learned how to set up and run a recording session for two acoustic reggae guitarist-vocalists. The kids who came in to play for us were friends of one of the students; this would be an excellent opportunity for them to get state-of-the-art recordings for free!
The class is only supposed to be two hours long officially, but we're allowed to come in early and stay late as we see fit/please; today, most of us were there for about three hours.... It took the class about an hour (before our "official" start time) to get all of the mics & sound wall set up the way we wanted. Each of the two performers had three different mics set on them--a condenser for the fretboard, a dynamic for the guitar sound hole, and a mic for the vocals (one of the vocalists' mics had a pop screen in front of it, the other did not); the two performers were separated by a windowed sound wall.
I now have a new respect for those who have to run recording sessions; we had a pretty small set-up (only 6 mics total), and it took us about an hour and fifteen minutes to conduct a painstakingly-thorough soundcheck. After getting all of the mics' pre-amp gains set to what we thought would've been acceptable levels, we recorded a couple of raw run-throughs, and then had the musicians come into the mixing room to hear how they sounded through the mics, changing their settings according to the performers' preferences.
After the soundcheck, we were finally able to record some music, which would be turned into a "master mix" by some students for their final projects. All in all, we were able to record about 5 different songs (16 takes) in about fifty minutes. Not too shabby. Our fourth "hour" of class was spent disassembling everything and chatting with classmates about our recording projects.
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