In this hour-long tutorial, Ben and I looked over the mixes that I had done for each track and Ben gave me valuable feedback on how they could be improved before I submitted them. He mentioned that the kick drum was too loud, the clean guitars too quiet, the vocals too withdrawn in places, the drum reverb being overwhelming in terms of low end and that the double tracking of the acoustic guitars on Kingfishers wasn’t quite working. As I was in the studio which has higher-quality monitors than I have at home, I also noticed some other aspects that needed changing which I would not have noticed without the help of this tutorial. I have resolved all of these issues along with others that Ben mentioned in my updated mixes and have listened to them on a variety of different speakers to check the sound is consistent.

This tutorial took place the day before the evening recording session with the band and so Ben and I ran through any last minute issues that were there. He checked over the recording plan that I had created and mentioned that it would be beneficial to get the bassist of YCIALM to come to the evening session so that drums and bass could be tracked live together, saving time. Ben also looked at the checklist I had created for recording drums and mentioned that recording hi-hat and ride with C1000s might make them stand out a little too much in the mix. Consequently I chose to use SM57s on these cymbals. Our next tutorial was to be on the 13th of April, which would give me time to start mixing the project and making our next tutorial an hour long. This was because I wanted longer for feedback on my mixes.

In this tutorial I mentioned to Ben that the band had finally replied to me and everything was going well regarding the planning of the project. However, the band had told me in the week that we’d be limited to one and a half days of recording which was concerning me due to the amount of recording that would need to get done in such a short space of time. Ben advised that it would be a good idea to create a recording plan so that the session would run as smoothly as possible and to set deadlines for the sessions so that time would not be wasted unnecessarily. He also advised me to create a checklist of key pieces of research that I was going to implement in the recording stage. This can be found on this blog.

In this tutorial, I showed Ben the further research I’d done on the producers so far and informed him of the slight concerns I was having about communication with the band. Ben advised me to send another message in order to get their attention which I did. Other than research, there wasn’t anything to show this week.

I had to miss one week of tutorials so my next tutorial with Ben was two weeks later. I showed him all of the research I’d done so far on producers like Butch Vig and Chris Sheldon and told him about preparations for the recording dates with the band. There was little else to show besides research as recording hadn’t started yet.