Garage Hymnal at Work

I recorded Garage Hymnal at the ABC the other day.  It was fun being able to record friends.  It was a full on day.  They are an 8 piece band and we only had till 3pm to get 6 songs down.  That is not a lot of time.  It wouldn't be unusual to spend till 3pm getting set up for a band that size.  So it was a speedy set up and record.

The instruments were - drums, bass, 3 guitars, keyboards/piano.
They have two female lead vocalists.
I put all the instruments in the large recording room together and the vocals went in the isolated booth so that they didn't get lots of loud instruments spilling into their mics.  I put baffles around the drums to get some isolation from the rest of the band.  Then the band all played together and and did 2-3 takes of each song before moving onto the next.  All the vocals were recorded live with the band.

Some pics thanks to various band members.

My channel list.  For a setups this big it's good to be ultra organised and work things out before you get into the studio on the day.  I had several of these printed out so I could easily keep track of where everything was going.  The last 6 channels were only for an option if they decided to do some unplugged stuff, but they didn't, so we went the electric band, using up to channel 26.  Plus I added in 2 DPA mics for the acoustic piano, plus a mic underneath the snare drum as well as the one on top.  The other change was to use a 414 on one of the vocalists and an 87 on the other.  It's sometimes good to use different mics on different singers so that you get a slightly different sound quality which makes it easier to blend in the mix.