Our assignment for the AUD4400 Module was to individually carry out a production from start to finish (from finding a band all the way to the pre-master stage). This blog is a fragment of my production logbook regarding the aspects of planning the session recording and reference tracks.​

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  What genre to record – May 13

 

            As a jazz pianist, the type of genre (band) I was aiming for was jazz, soul, r&b, indie-pop, neo-soul or funk, as it’s what I’m most familiar with and will provide for easier communication with the musicians and an understanding of their musical language, performance, sound.

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  Reference tracks - 

•  ​"Do You Wanna Do Nothing With Me?" by Lawrence (2016)

•  "Fool's Gold" by Amy Winehouse (2003)

•  "Gold Plated" by PYJÆN (2020)

 

  Finding the band –  May 25

 

            After a couple weeks of getting in touch with various musicians, ultimately through communicating with a drummer from the Royal Academy of Music (and his friends’ networks) I was directed to the band “Akin Soul & the Soul Tribe” (led by David Ijishakin). I wanted a band that was professional, that consisted of great musicians, but also one that is not too experienced with studio recording or with multiple albums, as to not feel too much pressure on working with my first recording project. Akin Soul (David) had 2 great quality released songs on Spotify and the genre fit perfectly, not to mention he was more than ready to help out to do a recording.

 

Planning the recording –  June 5

 

            Communication was the biggest worry in pre-production. David was extremely busy with performing, gigging and networking alongside his full-time jazz studies. So a few days after getting in touch I realised that having a live-recording session would prove most beneficial due to 2 reasons –

• Everyone from the band has a generally busy schedule, so that way they‘d only need to allocate one single day for my project.

• They are most familiar with playing all together in a live setting. By taking that away I would risk jeopardising the quality of their performance and ultimately my recording.

After a while I had finally gathered most of my requested information, including a reference track to their song, the make-up of their entire band (which was due to change the night before the recording) and we circled in our recording date – July 5. My choice of studio was the Neve Custom 75 due to -

• The amount of channels available and that I would require if I was to record the full band of 9 people.

• Live room is larger than the AWS 900, so I’d be able to accommodate everyone more comfortably as well as the sound having more room to spread out and cause less spillage in adjacent microphones (farther away from each other).

• Drum booth being connected to the Live Room, allowing the drummer to see and visually communicate/send cues to everyone else.