This was a tutorial I had with Lee in the Multitrack, which we used for him to give me some tips on mixing guitars. Having attended the second year session on recording drums I felt more confident in the studio. We also discussed the fact that I had booked a room in Insonic Studios on Monday the 21st to record drums. While this would cost me £70 I feel it was worth it in order to try and use the same methods used by Rich Costey, which would have been much more difficult in the live room at the university.

In this session Lee listened to the demos I had for the tracks I was going to record and also suggested asking a first or second-year student to be my assistant engineer when recording guitar in the studio. As a result of this Jamie Proctor worked with me on the guitars.

After presenting my Individual Learning Outcomes (can be found in their own category on this blog) to Lee, which he was happy with, we started discussing the next stage, which would be to record the drums for the project. Lee suggested I get in contact with Insonic Studios, to get the desired drum room sound, which I eventually did.

He also suggested I attend several extra sessions on recording drums and guitar to get a feel for the studio which, as a transfer student, I didn’t have too much experience of.

In this session I showed Lee my initial presentation which showed many of the ideas that I carried forward in this project. I did not, however, write my own Individual Learning Outcomes, which I would need to do for our next session. My presentation was close to complete, I just needed to add these and the project would be ready to go ahead.

In this tutorial, Lee and I further discussed what I wanted to do as a project and narrowed it down to creating something researched based that would be influenced by the work of Rich Costey. This then changed slightly to be influenced by the work of John Leckie and Rich Costey on Muse’s first three albums and Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Renegades.’

We narrowed it down to an EP of original material, rather than the idea of covering popular songs in Muse’s style like I had suggested.

The the next session Lee set me a checklist of things to do. It was as follows;

• Research and discuss the record production techniques used by Rich Costey on the following albums: xx x xx xx
• Use a selection of these production techniques to inform and shape the sound of an EP of original material.

You need 4-5 of these.  Make sure that they’re measureable and specific.

• By next week (or maybe week 5) you will need to informally present your project proposal.
• Do a powerpoint and cover the following: The creative objectives of the project.  YOUR LEARNING OBJECTIVES. Synopsis of the nature of the final product (include, reference music, nature of the recording sessions).