Studio Rolls - Desk Engineer

On Thursday the 29th, Group 2 was booked in to track the drums for our Sound-A-Like project. Our drummer was Daniel Marassutti, who would be covering Foo Fighters, Everlong for us. On the day each group member was to be responsible for an aspect of the recording process. We were told that we should choose our rolls between us before the day of recording.

I chose to be the desk engineer for the day because out of all the roles i think i am least confident at this one. I would like to not have to think about making a mistake on the desk when recording, reserving my thoughts for more important things.

I arrived to the session early to familiarise myself with the desk, from what I understood it was just a bigger version of the Audient studios we had already worked in and luckily, this was the case. It didn’t take me long to understand the signal flow and from there I could work out what needed to be done. With the help of Trinski, I labeled and made sure i was prepared for the drummer who was to be coming in a few hours.

After setting up the appropriate gain structure and making sure the outboard gear was being used correctly, the recording session went very well. (apart from me accidentally tapping the spacebar mid recording, i have learnt to know where my hands are at all times). The drummer requested at one point that he would like to hear the reference track in stereo and i was quickly able to make that happen.

If I was to do this again I would like to be more involved in setting up the outboard gear and understand the difference between external pre-amps and how they run through the board. But because we had such a large group it was a little hard to be involved in all of the aspects of setting up.