From the outside, the cement walls of the Belfer Audio Lab seem cold and uninspiring, tucked away on the side of E.S. Bird Library. Yet inside, it is the home and workshop of artists creating music of all genres.

On Thursday, three students from MUI 307: Music Performance and Media hit the studio in an attempt to put together a 10-minute multi-track recording in studio. In other words, these students will be assuming the role of professional producers and engineers.

Inside the control room, the recording process takes place. Yes, playing the actual instruments are important, but the quality of the recording is based on the skill and precision of using the tools of the trade. It is a collaboration: a melding of classroom knowledge applied to the studio equipment and students handling the equipment on their own for the first or second time with the guidance of an audio teaching assistant.

‘For this project, we broke into groups and then were thrown into the recoding process,’ said Katie Reilly, a senior political science and policy studies major and music industry minor. ‘As we were going through the sessions, in class is where we learned why we did things in studio.’

With four hours of studio time blocked out, Reilly and two classmates began working on their project.

‘(The project) is open to whatever you want to do,’ said Josh Mabie, a junior computer art major and music industry minor. ‘Both Pat and I play, so we just used us. It doesn’t matter who or what you use – all that matters is good, quality recording.’

In a previous session, the group had recorded three songs: guitar on two original songs written by Mabie, and piano and drums on a cover of Ben Folds Five’s ‘Missing the War,’ chosen by Patrick Reilly, a junior television, radio and film major and music industry minor.

The plan for the session was to record drums, played by Jeff Peters, a fellow classmate and a junior television, radio and film and music history major and music industry minor, on all three tracks and record Patrick Reilly on bass. If time allowed, the group was going to lay down vocals on the three tracks.

‘You make a plan before you go into studio,’ Reilly said. ‘But you don’t normally get to everything. You have to practice and decide what mics to use beforehand.’

The first issue they came across was how to upload their prerecorded files from burned CDs onto the Radar, a digital recorder that records the rough sound – the sound coming from the instruments, not the sound coming from the speakers, said Allison Bruen, a senior audio teaching assistant and music industry major.

Using a Mac computer, multiple blank CDs and a regular CD player, the group successfully uploaded the recordings to begin the session.

Next on the agenda was setting up and placing microphones around the drum kit, which takes time, Mabie said. Setting up the microphones is half the battle.

‘With drums, you have to check the snare and cymbals, make sure it has the snap you want,’ Patrick Reilly said. ‘If you don’t, the drums will be bland and flat. You have to make sure the snare, toms, hi-hat, bass drums all sound different and give a good sound.’

As Peters sat down behind the drum kit and proceeded to warm up, Reilly, Bruen and Mabie took their places at the control board to check the levels. The three made sure that each of the five microphones were not clipping.

‘Clipping is when you’re recording and the decibel level goes above zero decibels,’ Reilly explained. ‘It creates a distorted sound, crackly. You can definitely hear it.’

After a couple of minutes – no clipping. Then the actual recording commenced.

From the soundproof control room, the group listened as Peters pounded out the beat of the song. He could only hear the piano track he was accompanying. After he had finished, he came back into the control room as the fresh recording was played back with the piano and drum tracks.

‘This was not my first experience recording,’ Reilly said. ‘But (the studio) is really high quality. What you play is what you hear.’

As the recording played, everyone was singing, bobbing their heads, tapping their toes or playing air drums. This record and playback routine happened a few times before everything sounded perfect.

Then the group moved on to the next piece while Reilly practiced the bass for Ben Folds Five’s ‘Missing the War.’ For the song ‘Countless,’ one of Mabie’s originals, drum tracks needed to be recorded. For Peters, it was a chance to show what he could do. His only instruction from Mabie was a crescendo at one point in the song.

‘He is one of the best drummers in the area,’ Reilly said during the recording session.

When listening back, there was one area where the timing was off; whether coming in too late or too early, it had to be fixed. Rather than having Peters rerecord the entire song, Bruen set up the Radar to ‘punch in’ the sound. Punching in, Bruen said, requires setting up the system to record only a portion of the song, essentially fixing the one segment without taking the time to redo everything else.

Once work on ‘Countless’ was satisfactory, the group moved onto another Mabie original titled ‘Cute.’ Already in the Radar, the project just needed Peters on drums. Always learning, Mabie himself adjusted the levels on the board in preparation. But before this could happen, the levels had to register in the Radar.

‘Sometimes things just don’t work,’ Mabie said. ‘It has to be set up right, routed correctly and mixed at the proper levels.’

Communicating with Peters through headphones and hand signals, Mabie told him from inside the control room when to come in on the track. That was it for Peters’ portion of recording.

Next on the agenda was recording Reilly’s bass on ‘Missing the War.’ Reading the tabs from a collection of Ben Folds Five music, the first take went smoothly. However, on playback and reading along with the music, Reilly found some places that needed to be rerecorded. Sitting on the chair, grabbing the bass and putting on the headphones again, he ran through it once and it was perfect.

The last thing to do as the session came to a close was pack everything up. Put all the microphones back into their cases, wrap all the routing cords, turn off the machines and call it a day.

The group came into the studio with simple guitar or piano tracks, and by the end of their four-hour time slot, they had what began to sound like a real song. One more session – planned for next Tuesday – and the group will have completed its own musical composition.

‘Next time, we are doing vocals and post-production,’ Mabie said. ‘We have to make sure we have a solid mix. No clipping, no distortion and making sure it’s a quality song.’

Published on December 3, 2007 at 12:00 pm