Session Review Dan B Piano - 12/05/14

I took part in Dan Burrows's recording session as an engineer, he asked me to engineer his session in which he was performing piano for his track which is an epic piece which you would think is from an actual film, since i had not been an engineer for our EP and one of the requirements for the FMP is for everybody to be an engineer at some point. When I arrived at the session Dan B and Alex D were already setting up the Yamaha piano with a Marshall amp connected through a jack cable and we had a SM57 set up about 3 inches away from the amp because that is what we were mainly recording, we also set up 2 SE 1A's to capture the ambience of the piano but we ran into a problem with them because we were planning of using on C1000s but we couldn't find a mic clip for one of them so we switched to the 1A's and it solved our problem and that was the only problem with the session, we also set up a talkback mic for Dan using a SM58 so he could talk to us from the live room.  

The Piano Set Up

When it came to record Dan on the Piano, i had created a blank session with 3 audio tracks, 2 for the Amp microphone and the other for talkback, the 3rd audio track was for the SE1A's and since they are stereo mics. I then imported Dans backing track into the session and matched it up with the tempo which was 140BPM and then created a click track for Dan to play along too. After all that had been set up i started to set the gains for each microphone so that we had a good level when we came to record and would not have to change them during the recording. Dan had a play through before we started recording so that he was practised and knew what he was recording, once that had been done we started the recording and he recorded 8 bars for his opening of his track and then we punch recorded 39 bars of outro and that took a few takes because Dan kept either missing notes or playing the wrong ones, which is normal for a recording session, after the recording we had done all we wanted and then saved the session and took the audio of the recordings we liked and put it on Dans memory stick and then Mat Q and Alex D who were both assistants started to pack away the piano and the microphones, stands and all cables and i turned the Mac off and turned off all the equipment that needed to be turned off in the correct order. Overall i believe i performed very well in the session as i did everything that was asked of me and i had communication with Dan and set up and put away everything correctly.

Pro Tools Session For Dan B