The reason it wasn't all that noticeable there was because their control room is about 5x8 (smaller than the booth, actually...
), with the monitors basically touching 2 walls (the desk was all the way to the back, and it was as wide as the 5 foot room. you basically had to stand in the little main room (about 12x12 maybe?) outside the booth and control room and listen. This room basically had plywood on the walls.
The control room was also carpeted wall to wall, floor to ceiling, basically turning it into a big ass bass cannon. And there were mirrors all over the booth and the control room. The acoustics there were atrocious.
They had the little 5" Mackies cranked all the way up, both facing straight ahead and wedged in the corners. and it was a raw session, with like 6 tracks of vocals playing stacked.
Everything was LOUD. It wasn't until I began the mix and began soloing tracks that I saw the damage that was done. You should have heard me yelling and cussing.
And it's funny, I was talking to one of the guys in the studio, and he was basically chastising me because I don't use Pro Tools, and "REAL" studios use Pro Tools...yada yada yada... And then half way through recording, they ran out of tracks! Had to start bouncing things down, which made it more of a pain in the ass, because the intro underdub, part of the hook, my 2nd verse adlibs, and part of Lay's 3rd verse are all on one track, etc. etc... so I had to slice it all back up in Audition.
Then to make it even worse, I brought a blank DVD to burn the session data to... but that wonderful Mac of theirs doesn't burn data DVD's! WTF?!? So, in order to make it fit on my 2gig jump drive, I had to ditch all the outtakes and only came with the consolidated session files.
My microphone probably cost more than everything in there.
I was trying not to be an asshole and respect the engineer and not tell him what to do lol...
The experience was great; the studio was terrible. But I'm determined... I'm going to clean it up and make it right. Maybe at a later date, we can re-record in my booth, but until then, I'm going to have to do the best I can with this.
I'd post a short clip of the vocal damage, but I'd have to make sure that's cool with Lay first.