britney comes to forum

Well, this forum was absolutely jam packed with information. Our guest speaker, Peter, had two, entirely different topics to speak about and we got to hear of both. Topic one: Doing a live recording of a 20 piece big band ensemble, how the heck to approach it... PRE PRODUCTION!!!!! Peter couldn't stress enough the value of solid pre production when you have 20 odd people hanging around expecting everything to go smoothly. Handy/obvious advice included confirming with the band and booking your recording space well in advance of the recording day, inspecting the studio resources so to know what you have to play with. Coming in personally to assess the space and equipment/checking everything listed in the resources is physically present. Establishing how you want the band located in the room and making a diagram (which stays in the room). It seems that protoolsing things up is inevitable. Peter found that the trumpets and piano player might nail their parts straight up but the trombonists sound better on the fifth take, he spent a bit of time afterwards mixing and matching takes until he had the best of everything. He also extensively cleaned up spill on the various tracks. The second hour was spent talking about sound production in the advertising industry (where the money is). So the secrets to these super smooth, highly produced sounds....compression, LOTS of it, auto tune/rhythm (Peter says no advances have been made in audio fidelity over the last 10 years, just corrective plugins - how sad). Engineers cut away the gaps in between vocals to make the singer seem even bigger than life. Engineers working on big advertising projects get to use huge protools sessions capable of supporting 190 tracks. There can be potentially 5 or 6 different mixes of the same song stacked on top of each other. The reason for this is because Advertising executives and the so forth are probably in the control room with the engineering and wanting to listen to all available options so as to be able to choose their preferred mix. It seemed to me that this would prove to be an organisational NIGHTMARE. Peter stays on top of things by using markers