After 2 long rehearsals that everyone attended we were ready to record. Before starting I made sure I reconnected with my initial aim of the project so I could vision the mix I was preparing for. Since I was going for a raw, organic sound and with so many instruments I decided it was best to aim for a mix with a lot of space between the instruments. This meant recording with sparse effects. Trying to get a suitable guitar tone I found the most tedious part of the process as I had to record many different takes to make sure I have many to pick from when doing the mixing.
I put a room mic in the same position and recorded it with every take. Hopefully this will become very useful in the mixing stage to ensure the instruments sound like they are in the same place.
I also decided to record the drum and bass parts together. This helped ensure that they were in sync and had the same energy throughout. After this we had a day of recording the guitar, then harp and sax and then vocals. By recording each instrument on a different day, as opposed to track by track, I could take less of the bands time up.
Overall this process took over 50 hours and involved re-recording many drum parts as the slight timing issues only became more prevalent with other instruments being recorded on top. I had to get creative with recording the harp tone for the third movement as it involves a lot of the lower strings which sound muddy when played in succession. This meant that I had to mute the strings with a tie (and later my fingers) while Phoebe (our harpist) played to reduce the decay time of the notes.
Below - A brief plan of the recording sessions
Below - some photos of our recording sessions