Recording a band LIVE in a rehearsal room! (Guffland MOBILE! :-))

I completed a recording session earlier in the week (offsite!) for an electric guitar/drums duo in a rehearsal room. The guys were wanting to create a couple of live performance videos with good quality audio and asked me to help out. While the room was a little on the small side, it gave reasonable visual aesthetics to the overall goal, and so we chose to make it work. Charlie Bedford (guitar and vocals) and Tim Anderson (drums) had just wrapped up a four-gig festival, so felt good-to-go on capturing a solid 'live' feel performance in the space.

Charlie's guitar sound these days is completely digital: he uses a ToneX amp-sim stomp box, which he runs through either his own PA setup, or through a DI box to the venue PA. For a bottom-end boost, he adds in a Boss Octaver stomp for the chorus or solo as required. It means a simplified setup every time, along with pretty much the same tonal sound he wants every time. Simple and reliable.

Tim's drum set up is more traditional. :-) An acoustic drum kit with snare, toms and kick in line with what you would expect. He also enjoys an array of cymbals as part of his sound.

For me, I wanted to capture something of the live sound performance between the two, but also record enough of the individual instrument sounds to enable more control of the final product. I used my home-studio gear (which is relatively portable) to give me 12 inputs (8 Unison preamps and 4 4/710 tube preamps). I used those as follows:

Universal Audio 8pre:
1. Kick drum - OPR U47FET mic through API Vision pre
2. Snare top - Shure SM57 mic through API Vision pre
3. Snare bottom - Shure SM57 mic through API Vision pre (with polarity flipped)
4. Tom - Sennheiser MD-441U mic through API Vision pre
5. Tom - Sennheiser MD-441U mic through API Vision pre
6. Electric guitar - DI pre-effects
7. Electric guitar - DI post-effects through a Neve 1073 pre
8. Electric guitar - DI Boss Octaver

Universal Audio 4/710d:
1 and 2. Stereo drum OH - Nude Swiss Army Knife Stereo Ribbon with only a touch of compression
3. Wurst - Shure SM57 mic with some more aggressive compression
4. Vocal - Sennheiser MD-441U with only slight compression (there was a deal of cymbal spill to avoid).

The song 'Enemy' was written by Charlie Bedford and performed by the Charlie Bedford Duo. Check them out at: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0vtw5...

Make sure you check out the final video(s) - I'll link them when they're available.

You can check out my music at https://marklowrie.bandcamp.com/.

@gufflandstudios

#marklowrie #charliebedford #homerecording #musicproducer #musicproduction #audioengineer #recordingstudio #audioengineering #gufflandstudios #tvshowtheme #theme #guitar #bluesguitar #blues #bluesrock