Rhythm N Rhyme

“Rhythm n’ Rhyme” is a 6 man hip-hop band that includes; drums, bass guitar, pianist, and 3 vocalist. They are based out of Las Vegas. They perform local shows around town during events.

            The recording process of recording the band was done at the Art Institute of Las Vegas in Studio Suite A. It took seven microphones to mic up the drums. Everything else only needed one microphone.

            All the microphones from the drums were routed through patch a, inputs one through seven. Patch a in the studio is and patch b are automatically routed to the mixing board. The overhead microphones were positioned high and in the center of the sound source using the “ORTF Technique.” Then the snare, hi-hat, and toms were positioned with the close distance technique.

            The bass was set up with a DI Box and an additional microphone to get two separate recordings. The bass was also routed through patch a on inputs 8 & 9. The vocalist and the pianist were all routed through batch b on inputs 17 to 20. After every musician was routed properly, it was time to start adjusting the levels of each instrument and vocalist.

            Once everyone was at an appropriate level, it was time to record. The session took about two hours. The band started off with a warm up before they really got into the grove. They recorded six songs in total. Prior to recording, I directed the videographer to get several wide shots and close ups of each member of the band.

            After the band was finished, it was time to tear down the equipment and clean up the studio back to the way it was before we got there. I postponed the mix session for another day.

            Recording and mixing the session were done in different days. The recording was multi-tracked through the Solid State Logic Duality Mixing Console. The mixing was done at another studio that provided Pro Tools along with an acoustical mixing environment. I recorded all the instruments and vocals raw so I can enhance it during the post mix session.

            While I was mixing, I had to take out as much bleeding from other instruments as I can without disrupting the harmonic tones. I then added a little compression and filtering to most of the instruments and vocals except the hi hats. Not much mixing was needed as the bands recording came out great.

            After mixing, I synced the audio with the raw videos and started to edit the bands song. The video editing was done though Avid Media Composer 8. The editing took a little over 4 hours to complete a rough sequence. I then took critique from another eye before starting to finalize the edit.

            Overall, this process of multi-track recording, mixing, and editing took a long time to complete. It was a big musician-recording project that helped me understand how a band works. I learned a lot about how I should mic each instrument, and also a lot about how to filter out any unwanted bleeding noise.