The Docs are an indie rock style band. They use overdriven guitars and fast playing to create songs with a good amount of punch.

I found they were a mix between the Artic Monkeys and the Foo Fighters.

They incorporated a large amount of stylistic elements from the Artic Monkeys.

I read an article by James Ford, on the production of the Artic Monkeys 4th album.

http://www.soundonsound.com/people/james-ford-producing-arctic-monkeys

In this article he talks about wanted a simplistic vibe. They talk about the enjoyment of not wanting to tweak little things and having a basic natural sound. We tried to embrace this philosophy by being minimalistic in the recording stage.

The recording method we used allowed us to keep a large amount of the natural aspect of The Doc’s playing. Without using a click the band to be more comfortable and relaxed while recording creating a live feel to the songs.

As we recorded in a live scenario mixing was rather simple. The main goal was to blend all the instruments together while maintaining the band’s vibe. From watching them play the songs in the session I noticed they were very guitar driven. I used this overview when mixing.

The drums for their style needed to be punchy and hard hitting to help keep with the paces of their songs. I compressed the drums relatively heavily to create this vibe and to compensate for some recording problems.

Overall I was very happy with how their mix came out as I feel it fits their style well.

Sunda Strait was also done in a similar process to this.

 

The vocalist from the band Sunda Strait came back in to redo vocals. This was due to the fact he was ill for the previous session.

During this session, we also re-tracked his guitar parts as last time his guitars intonation was out causing his tuning to fluctuate.

For vocals, we tracked using a Neuman U87 running through a sony rack-mounted compressor. This gave very rich sounding vocals with a lot of expression.

This session was very easy and we were finished in a few hours. We were all really happy with how everything came out.

Over the course of the past week, I have done some research in how to market a product towards a school.

There are some main principles that products marketed to schools need to have. They mainly need to be.

• Cost Effective
• Educational
• Quick

All the sites I looked at which explained how to sell towards the education sector all said these things. The product must be at an affordable price, due to the funding of schools. The product must have some kind of educational value, and it must be done quickly.

This website gives a list of essentially everything that you need to do in order to sell products in the education sector.

https://www.incensu.co.uk/news/view/effective-education-marketing

This website contains more information on the school format and what kinds of products the schools buy. It even talks about who has the money and who to talk to.

http://read.businessadvisersdirect.co.uk/2013/10/24/how-to-sell-to-schools/

We have used this information to tailor our products presentation towards the education sector.

 

This day was mainly focused on recording a band named Suna Strait.

As the studio was left exactly how it was the previous day the band could turn up and instantly be recorded. This meant the session was very quick and felt very professional.

We were also able to track vocals this day as they got playback to work from Protools. Due to technical problems, the previous session didn’t have playback meaning we couldn’t overdub vocals. The guitarist and singer of The Doc’s came back in to track vocals.

This meant that we left this session with a total of 7 tracks fully recorded with vocals. We are planning a future session where we are redoing some vocal parts for Sunda Strait as the singer was ill.

Overall we were very happy with how smoothly this day went and we are very happy with the quality of the recordings.

This week we decided to have an email tutorial. This was because Joe and I had scheduled this as a recording day.

The recording process hit a few bumps early on as due to a hardware malfunction the studio was down for a number of hours. We were told the studio would be up and running so we continued to set up equipment.

We discussed previously what we thought would work best for the recording process. As we wanted to record a large number of songs in a short space of time we opted for a semi-live approach. We accomplished this by having all the musicians in separate rooms but all playing at once. This gave us a very quick way of recording a large amount of material to a high quality.

Our main drawback to this method was due to the technical problems. The band had arrived early and because of this, we had to continuously send them away. We felt this left an unprofessional feel around the session which was unavoidable. The first band was called The Doc’s. They had been recorded at the university before and had a bad experience then. We made it our aim to try and be different.

Once we started the recording session it went really well. Even though we couldn’t play the material back we were happy with how everything sounded during the session.

Our hope of this session was to have everything set up ready so the bands could turn up and record. This would make it easier on us and on them creating a professional vibe over the project.

Overall The Doc’s were very accommodating with all the issues and we left with surprisingly high-quality recordings considering the circumstances.

The Doc’s Sample Mix – Song 2