posted by cs004 on Oct 20
On Sunday, October 19, 2008, I had the priviledge of attending and observing a live recording of Phili’s own Dirk Quinn Band, an awesome up-and-coming jazz/funk band, in Studio A at LVC. The band consists of a guitarist, bassist, key-man, drummer, trumpeter, and saxophonist/flutist, though the horns were not able to attend the session. The engineers working on the tracking were Andy Mowatt, Mike Kudrak, and Jon “AES man”. They were all working on a project in which they need to record, and mix, and possibly master; though their grades rely mostly on mix. This session however was soley the recording part. I attended part of their session for about two and a half hours, and it was not exactly what I expected. I got there after they set everything up, so the band was already practicing and jamming. When I got there I learned that they had already recorded the first song, and did it in about 4 to 5 takes I believe. In the two and a half hours I was there, they recorded two more songs, and then we cleaned up. Before this studio observation, I thought a recording session had a lot of work associated with it from start to end. However, we just mostly sat around, talking about cool and creative ideas about what to do with the song once the group would get to the mixing. This session was basically just getting all the tracks down, making sure they sound pristine and ready for mixing. Occasionally the group members would dabble around with the pan potentiometer and the fader to tweak the sound, but the was pretty much it until clean up. From about 4:00 p.m. to 5:45 p.m., the second song, Seven Swings, was recorded. It took about 4 complete takes and a whole lot of jamming before that song was laid down. I was impressed because every take sounded so good and was very tight. The only reason for re-takes was maybe 1 or 2 mistakes that might have been an 8th note off or so. One might not even realize the mistakes unless they went back and relistened carefully, which, since this was a recording, would obviously be done. Each take was similar too but not exactly a like. They were great improvisers, and halfway through my stay in the session, I learned that the keyboardist didn’t even know the songs prior to the session. Anyways, after doing about 4 to 5 complete takes of each song, the session was practically over. Kudrak burnt the last two takes of the first song, and the last three takes of the last two songs onto a C.D. for the band so they could listen to it before coming back with the horns for the overdubbing session. While this was going on, I helped Andy and Jon clean up, wrapping cables and setting stands back in their place. Overall it was a cool and relaxing session.
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