Busy week - recording jazz

I've had to put my own stuff on the back-burner for a bit since work's been so busy.

It's that time of the year when the tutors are rostered on for spending a week in the studio with the Diploma Audio students recording two songs for each of the Diploma Music bands. It's fun, but even regular admin work has to be done after 6pm each night, never mind any classes that have to be prepared, marking etc.

Also - went and recorded Mark Baynes' jazz trio live at the Lewis Eady piano showroom the other night with some students - Mark played on a $185,000 Steinway! Nice. The recording came out well.

I was a bit worried - I would usually use something like Pro Tools and a Digi 003, but we needed more mics (stupid 003 only has 4 mic preamps) so we ended up using my own Presonus Firestudio and my MacBook Pro running Logic 9. Two 50-odd minute sets went down without a hitch. Logic 9 somehow seems to sound better than previous versions!

MAINZ tutor and microphone-setup guru Paul Streekstra did the mic'ing up. Mostly omni mics - pair of Earthworks QTC50's over the piano, pair of Neumann Km133 omnis over drum kit and EV RE27 on bass drum. DI'd upright bass (he was playing through an amp) to which we ended up adding the "spare" Shure 57 pointing at the f-hole. It actually sounded great - hehe the good ol' 57 still works well. Not just a snare mic after all.

The students really enjoyed it - they often over-think things and try to get too tricky with microphone placement, and even their mic choice.