These audio files accompany the Guerrilla Recording article for June 2010 (/sos/jun10/articles/guerillarecording.htm).
For general enjoyment or amusement, here are some of the audio files I recorded in the example session for June 2010's cover feature on guerrilla recording. The band, The Incredible Flight of Birdman, were tracked live in a classroom at a local primary school.
Drums overheads raw
The unprocessed overhead signals from a pair of AKH D224E mics above and behind the kit. Thankfully these are relatively free from spill, though a small amount of bass can be heard.
Drums: Close mics raw
The unprocessed kick, snare and (gated) tom mics.
Room raw
I put up a room mic as an afterthought. Unsurprisingly there's more spill from other sources on this. I should have put it further away from singer Nick Osbourne. Oh well, I never like room mics much anyway.
Rough drum balance raw
A rough balance of all the drum mics, with no EQ or other processing.
Drums processed
The mixed drum sound, with kick and snare gated, plenty of EQ and compression, and some reverb on the snare. High-pass filtering the overheads has kept the bass spill from being too much of a problem.
Bass raw
I wanted to combine the miked signal from the bass amp with a DI'd version, but the DI output on the amp broke, so I was left with this. There's some spill from the drums, but a bigger concern is the lack of real bottom end in the sound.
Bass processed
In the mix, I used a combination of compression, severe EQ, Waves' Renaissance Bass and SoundToys' new Decapitator distortion plug-in to try to create a weightier bass sound.
Guitars raw
The electric guitar was the instrument that caused real headaches on this session. Again I tried to combine miked and DI'd signals, but there were problems with both. As you can hear, the DI'd signal (left channel) is badly clipped, while the miked signal in the right channel sounds pretty ropey and carries a lot of drum spill. This was the result of a dodgy multi-effects unit which often dropped the level when it should have been boosting it. In retrospect, I should probably have stuck a mic right up against the grille and put up with the harsh sound for the sake of less spill.
Guitars processed
The guitars as heard in the mix. Guitar Rig has done a reasonable job of disguising the clipping on the DI'd track — at least on the distorted sounds.
Rough mix
A snippet of my first very rough mix of the song, with the original guide vocals (which sound surprisingly good).
Frustrations
My semi-final mix of this song, 'Frustrations Of H', with replacement vocals recorded into a Sennheiser MD509 by Nick. I say 'semi-final' because it's possible we may re-record the guitars at some point.