Back in July I was contacted by Freeze Productions to record on a shoot they were doing of the Vitor Pereira Quintet. It sounded like a fun challenge, the video would be shot in a black box room above a pub in Walthamstow.
The first challenge would be to take all the gear needed to the location. I was able to secure a 16 input Focusrite rig for the gig and a nice ensemble of microphones from my friend and mentor, Dennis Weinreich. To complete the needed equipment I went to Sensible Music and rented some mics and DIs, mic cables and stands.
On the day all was going well, all the equipment got there on time and the setup was quick as we had a 5 hour window in which to setup, record, and break down. All was going well, the band was doing well and the tracking was progressing at a good speed. That's when I noticed these clicks in the recording, not always an easy thing to spot when you're monitoring in headphones while sitting in the same room as the band.
Problem solving hat on, I went to try to sort out the source of the problem. The clocking seemed stable and not an issue, all the cables were securely fastened... Then I realised it could be dirty power, we were in a pub after all and refrigerators are coming on and off all the time.
Lesson 1 learnt, make sure your power is clean when doing a location recording. Lesson 2, renting a venue to do a recording might seem cheap but once you factor all the rental and cartage costs it might turn out to be the same price, or even slightly more expensive than going into a studio and doing it there.
When the time came to mix it I was happy to confirm that everything sounded good, with the exception of the nasty clicks across all the tracks. In the beginning I was manually redrawing all the discontinuitiesmyself in Pro Tools but that proved too time consuming considering the number of fixes I had to do. That's when I decided to give iZotope RX a whirl and what a life saver it was! I would probably still be drawing waveforms now if it wasn't for that. So thank you iZotope for letting me have a life!
Now the mix is done and the videos are up on YouTube for everyone to enjoy!