During my time at musical, I have gotten the chance to help out in the studio with recording sessions. For the first session, I worked with engineer Dylan and helped record a project with his band. Before the bandmates arrived, we had to troubleshoot a few broken inputs, as well as identify a few broken channels on the board. I stayed in the studio and talked into mics to make sure we were getting signal. Once all the microphones were set up, I met the bandmates and took a seat behind the board to observe Dylan. I watched his workflow as he navigated Reaper, a DAW that I had heard about but had no experience using. We tracked scratch vocals, acoustic guitar, and djembe together and got a few good takes. We then tracked vocals alone in the studio, getting several takes. Once we got good takes of the vocals, Dylan grabbed his guitar and we recorded his guitar part overtop, as well as some group vocals and claps with the entire band. For this part of the session, I was in charge of hitting record and getting several takes of each part. Once we wrapped things up, I got back in the studio to help put away mics and cables. Overall, it was very valuable studio experience as I was able to learn about a different software, help where needed, and even jump in and run the session.

Here is the control room in Studio A at Musicol, with the band’s session pulled up on the monitors.

This is a photo I took from when I was running the session.