Recording The Choice

A good friend of The Choice kindly volunteered to record the band at one of our London gigs – The Royal Garden Hotel., Kensington.

We would like to thank him for his lovely spirit and time he spent recording and mixing.

Any of you bands out there that need a live demo give him a call, his details are at the end of this article.
He also plays in a band himself with his soon to be wife Charlie, they are destined for big things so check out their facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/charliesavigarmusic

 

 

 

 

The man himself – Daren!

 

 

 

 

Here is Darens experience of recording The Choice –  in his own words!

The challenge of how to record one of the hardest working Party bands in the UK.  The main things to overcome was how to mic up the band to get the best sound whilst staying discrete and not getting in the way of the function itself.  The gig was at the Kensington Garden Hotel and I had to make sure I could work around the band without disturbing anyone.

 

We had a choice of microphones available, and in the end I went for a combination of two Audio Technica AT4040 condenser mics, on small stands one in front of each PA speaker to get the main mix. Then a single Rode M3 mic to capture the drums, just offset to the side. The only issue then was how to capture the vocals to enable me to add them to the mix as required.  In the end we were lucky enough to find a spare Aux channel on the band’s mixing desk, normally reserved for external FX sends, and sending the three vocal tracks equally to this output worked very well. The singers tended to equalise themselves as they sang, so having them all on one channel turned out to not be a problem. The sound was all then recorded on a Yamaha AW16G hard disk recorder and it was a case of set the levels and press record.
Apart from a little bit of adjusting the input gain (as the singing got louder through the evening) it was a case of just listening in and enjoying the set. We also experimented with recording the sax directly from it’s wireless receiver into a Zoom hand-held recorder. This worked okay, but in hindsight I would have just plugged this output into my Yamaha recorder too and that would have made lining up the parts much easier later on.

 

So the band played and we ended up with over 3 hours of music! I told you they were hard-working. The next stage was mixing and this was fairly straight forward as the PA mics had all the mid range sound and the drum mic gave me a great amount of the drums low end and the very top end of the cymbals. Then the vocal mix and a bit of reverb to tie it all together and we had a result. I ended up mixing the first set and then handing over to Russell to let him have a crack at the later songs. Check out the mixes on the band’s website as they appear and I think you’ll agree we got the real essence of what they do live.

Check out the recordings by clicking on the Demos page:
http://www.thebandchoice.com/albums/darens-live-recordings-from-the-royal-garden-hotel-london/

 

For more information contact Daren – music@darencallow.co.uk or see http://www.darencallow.co.uk/services.html