Recording session two took place Saturday the 30th August in the C24 studio. Throughout the week following session one we had discussed our asset list and what items we could bring along to generate the sounds required. We decided to give the Slate VMS mic a try for this session as we had not used it before and our recording list included:
- The crucial guitar chord and feedback sounds
- Clicking noises for the gain and overdrive knobs and extra feedback sounds
- Door squeaking, mat dropping, key on concrete and door closing sound
- Key insert and turn, key jangle and some more dynamic click sounds
- Footsteps and skateboard sounds
- Clocks ticking and
- Generating a plectrum schwing sound (creative license i.e. not in original clip)
We also needed to spend some time refining our project plan, pre-production plan and ensuring our workflow was working to our advantage by being as effective as possible. The session went very well and all the items that were brought in generated the audio we were seeking apart from the skateboard which was plastic and had soft rubber wheels. We have however come up with a suitable alternative which will be recorded along with the remaining sounds and voice over parts in session three. The guitar parts took some time and experimentation to get the desired feedback sounds but we definitely got what we were looking for in the end.
After completing the recordings, we jumped into the task of editing some of these sounds, applying some basic EQ where required and placing them into the correct time stamp positions on the clip. We had some great results here and it was very satisfying to see the audio for our sound replacement slowly coming together. This however, is where we noticed something very distressing. We had lost some recordings, they were just gone?
When we started our recording in session one, Shay and I had decided that we would initially just use one track and label each clip according to its identity before placing them on their own track later on. Halfway through session two, we decided after discussion with Pat that this was not the most reliable workflow for our project and developed a new colour coding convention and commenced recording each sound on its own track. This worked well from the beginning and was just as quick once we got used to the new workflow. What we had been doing seemed to have worked well until we went to place the sounds on their own tracks and slot them in the mix in order of appearance in the clip as several were missing.
There are several reasons this had happened; the record button was accidentally left active on the track at the very bottom where we had originally tracked the clips from session one and part of session two. This track had been used before we began placing each sound on its own track from top to bottom in the order they occur in the clip. We had also duplicated the guitar chord to fatten it up and inadvertently promoted it over a separate recorded sound and there was another lost sound that we cannot even explain. The point is, it doesn’t matter ‘how’ it happened, what matters is that we know ‘why’ it happened; our workflow was flawed! Whilst we were able to retrieve the missing sounds from the audio files, this was an extremely frustrating situation and certainly a real time waster.
Takeouts from Session Two
We really worked well together with Shay (for the most part), in this session assuming the role of DAW operator, Patrick fine tuning our operational and planning documentation whilst offering constructive input on the recording process and myself in the foley space generating the sounds for tracking. Our knowledge of the signal flow and C24 operation increased markedly and we were all really excited to have access to this new studio. Unfortunately, often the best method for learning the correct way to do something is by making costly errors and whist our lackluster workflow caused us some real headaches, on this occasion did not result in us needing to re-record a multitude of sounds. Just lucky this time and valuable lesson learned!
Abundant Audio 
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