Doctor Zoot - Live Set
When the pandemic hit and I was thinking of artists to come in to perform to help them through the lack of live shows, right at the top of the list was Doctor Zoot. I love this band! Please continue to read on but do so while you have the video above playing because really, there is little I can say to really do any justice to how good I think their music is - I hope you feel the same.
Having worked with Doctor Zoot to release their EP a little while ago, I was eager to get them back in the studio in anyway I could. Having seen them perform live already, the covid pandemic really was a great opportunity to do just that. There are challenges to recording a band in a room of this size and does come with it’s compromises but I think we all feel it still turned out great and captured some of that live energy they have when they play together on stage.
The biggest challenge is bleed. Bleed is when sound from another source in the room, enters the microphones of another source. In this scenario, the biggest culprit is always going to be the drums. They’re going to go everywhere. We did our best in sectioning off the drums with massive gobos and where possible, had the nulls of the live mics towards them. At a certain level though, you just have to accept it and ‘lean into it’ so to speak. So there are drums in the piano mics - so what? They’re now piano mics and drum room mics. That’s just how it goes! While it is a bit of crazy time setting up, it’s also a whole bunch of fun. To eliminate as much bleed as possible, we did DI all of the guitars and bass and used ‘amp sims’ for the players to monitor through. It was just a simple matter of Re-amping those after the session. The one thing we were still figuring out at this stage was the video element. We had the help of Bradley Lyness from ‘Lyness Motion’ here on the day but still, we had considerable ‘shake’ from the camera on Joe (the lead vocalist/pianist) stemming from the thud of the kick drum. We’ll just call it a deliberate effect, shall we?
Regardless, sound wise we captured something worthwhile. What this video highlights though is what can be achieved in a short amount of time. We spent about an hour actually playing the set, choosing the best selection of takes from that. We had about 2-3 hours of set up time. So in half a day of recording you can get a lot of music recorded, where if you went for a purely multitrack recording, it could take much, much longer than that. The results will be cleaner and give you more options, which is the massive plus side but it also costs much more. The good thing is, if you aren’t recording video, you can think of this as a spectrum. Thinking, “what elements of this can we record ‘live’, to reduce costs and then what elements should be leave for overdubbing?” A good option for bands can be recording drums, bass and basic guitars all at once and then overdub other guitar layers, vocals, backing vocals, synths etc. The only thing you have to keep in mind is you need to be tight. The band needs to be extremely well prepared. This is true regardless of recording method but is particularly pertinent when recording ‘live off the floor’. This is something we will always offer to bands to help reduce costs but you just need to be aware of the potential downsides. It can save a bunch of time and thus money but if you aren’t ‘tight’, you can end up wasting a lot of time trying to get just 1 good take.
If you are interesting in recording, we would love to hear from you. Whether it’s live, multi-tracked or somewhere in between, we can cater for your needs and specific budget. Get in touch with us here and we will work out the best option for you.