The Oak Tree
Personell:
Guitar and vocals: Lucy Miller
Recording, Mixing and mastering: Gregory Slobodian
Here's a track I recorded back in 2015 during college, and at the time I was somewhat proud of my work - now 6 years later I've gone and re - mixed and mastered it. I figured it would make for a decent exercise and something to do whilst I have less time to record thanks to work (one day I'll break into the industry just you watch).
The original recording wasn't too bad for 16 year old Greg but I did go in and clean it up with iZotope's plugins as best I could to get rid of some of the background shuffling. I could have cleaned it up more if I had a spectral editor like RX but I aint paying £200 for 1 track. As for the mixing, because the set up was mid side on guitar, a pencil condenser on the guitar neck and another mic on the vocals there was a lot of bleed on everything which isn't really something I find too problematic in music, however here it was a little detrimental. To bring out the vocal mic, I used some EQ and a multi band compressor to isolate the vocals a little bit, and other than that I just added EQ and chamber reverb to my liking. If I were to re-record this I'd record a guide track with both vocals and guitar and then over that record guitar and vocals separately, that way I'm not hindered when trying to raise a specific part like the guitar but end up raising the vocals too because of it being on the guitar track.
Ultimately I'm happy with how this little exercise came out and I'm probably going to do a few more like this.
You can listen to the new version and the original one on soundcloud here:
