A peak inside a Recording Studio session

This appeared in my YouTube feed and it’s a fascinating watch, so I thought I would share it here.

Note that this is, unashamedly, a promotional video by Harrison Audio, but it’s for their large format console which costs in the region of $100,000, so it’s a market that I doubt anyone in this community is in.

The Harrison consoles were used on some iconic albums from Abba, Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, and others.

I got it in my video feed because I have Harrison Mixbus 10 Pro which is a DAW version of this console which is (as I type this) available for, a more reasonable, $130 in their Black Friday sale.

The video is the first in a series where they invite musicians into the Harrison studio to record a track. In this case, it’s the Nashville (the city, not the TV show) star Taylor McCall.

Aside from extolling the virtues of the console, they go into depth into some of the recording approach, especially on the drums and acoustic guitar, such as mic selections and processing, and show the rehearsals where some of the musical decisions are made. It’s a fascinating insight into how professional studio recordings are done.

And the music is pretty cool too.

Cheers,

Keith

9 Likes

Wow… very cool

Santa baby
Put a present under the tree
For me
:joy:

3 Likes

Nice share Keith, interesting piece of kit (as I sit here watching with my 6 strip Xenyx on the desktop ! :rofl: ). A good artist for recording purposes and someone to watch for in the future.
As you say, cool music.

:sunglasses:

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That was extremely cool!!!
The whole process done in a studio with professional musicians and the way it was explained… wow! For someone who has never seen anything like this before, it was pretty awesome!
Thanks for the share, Keith!

Tod

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Cool share for anyone with an interest in multitrack recording.
Made me smile to count a dozen different mics for the drums alone :rofl:
My ‘bandmates’ usually send me a single, dubious quality, mobile phone recording :wink:
There was much less mixing tips & tricks than I would have hoped for, and much more ‘this console just sounds great
Fair enough for a promotional video though. Everyone seemed to be on top of their game.

2 Likes

That’s a fair comment, but I think the mixing process can be rather dull in practice.

And I get the impression, both from this video, and from other material I have studied in the past, that the approach that a lot of “old school” productions tend to use is different from the more modern approach which seems to be to try to “fix it in the mix” using a plethora of plugins and processing.

Back in the day, they seem to have focused on capturing the recording as close as possible to what they want, so the need to mess with it afterwards is reduced. Hence, they seem to be using very little processing, mainly compression and EQ. And a lot of that is built into the console.

Cheers,

Keith

1 Like

Thanks for sharing the video, I added it to my bookmarks.

As for mixing, a sort of rule of thumb I heard from a professional audio engineer was that whatever parts are going to be included in the final mix, one should be able to hear them clearly enough to be transcribed. Of course, this depends on the type of music and the type of sound one is after, so there might be exceptions to this. Also, I’ve read that, for example, the acoustic guitars on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album were often mixed in a way “to be felt rather than heard”. But I guess that falls more on the creative side of things.

As for post-processing, I’ve heard that in the past it was sort of a requirement from the artist to have at least a vague idea of what the end-result should sound like effects-wise (e.g. reverb, wah-wah). This made the recording process more efficient as a lot of things could already be done during the recording instead of having to modify a plethora of dry-recorded tracks.