Week 7 Progress

 It has come to my attention that people would like more information on my recording process and how I use plug-ins within the sessions that I am working in. First I will say that over the past week i have recording a lot of guitars. I can not record drums at my house for acoustic reasons and the bass player of this band seems to be actively away at the moment. So I will focus this post on my progress with the album and also the guitars. For the rhythm guitars, I have been recording a PRS Tim Mahoney model with duel hum buckers as well as a vintage Les Paul with hum buckers. These pick ups give a nice fat and full tone. I record these guitars directly into an Avid Eleven rack with the main outs of the unit into the Focusrite 18i20. I have been using the 1989 SL-100 drive channel on the Eleven Rack, this is a very accurate representation of the Soldano SLO-100 amp head. this is the same amp that gives Warren Haynes' of The Allman Brothers his signature tone. This tone is sweet, fat and has a nice bit of gain that I was looking for in the rhythm guitar. I used the 4X12 cab that is rated to 65 watts and i used the Cond 87 which is an amazing emulation of the studio standard Nuemann U87. We recorded two songs with this amp combination and has worked for the songs very well. Once I recorded the guitars into Pro Tools, I then used the the SSL channel strip waves plug-in to EQ and control the dynamics. I put a hi pass filter on the guitars to cut any other lows that would interfere with the bass, vocals or any drums that might sit in the frequency area. Since guitars running through any amp have compression on them already I did not need to do much in the way of compression, however I did use Waves CLA-2A optical compression to give it just a little bit of a warmer and more natural feel to it.  I will come back to the mixing of the guitars once i have every thing recorded to do a proper final mix on the song. Next week I will discuss more of the songs structures and bass recording and the following week I will cover vocal recoding and drum techniques.  This project is coming along as I would like even though I have not been able to stick to a strict time schedule due to work and school and conflicts with the band. The only real issue that i have come across is getting the bass player/vocalist to actually show up to do his part. He is available this weekend though to get the bass recorded and Monday we are in the studio to work on vocals.