Planning
The Shure SM58 will be a great microphone for recording vocals. For the bass I'll use direct input, for the tambourine and piano I'll use the AKG C1000S mic. The AKG C1000S mic has a small diaphragm, which makes it great for picking up high frequency detail.
Process
I'll start by setting up a project in Cubase. First I would set the bpm of the project to the bpm of the original song, Somewhere Only We Know by Keane which is 86. I'll create an audio instrument in Cubase for Lauren's vocals, and use the SM58 Shure microphone to record her. In order to keep in time I'll use the metronome. Next I'll record the piano as another audio track. I'll use the AKG C1000S for this. After doing that I'll overdub the tambourine onto the track. The bass will be recorded using a direct input - plugging in directly into the mixer itself, rather than through an amplifier and recording through the amp. Direct input will be important because it eliminates background noise. To ensure the instruments are played in time to the song, we'll play the rest of the song through the headphones of the performer. We will use the monitor function to hear what the song will sound like through the mixer.
Evaluating
I found that the tambourine had to be adjusted slightly from the mixer or it would pick up too much sound and be distorted. I turned the gain down to fix this. I didn't like how the tambourine sounded and given the chance to do it again I would try a different instrument for percussion. The direct input sound from the bass was useful and sounded great because there was no unwanted background noise. In the original album Hopes and Fears the band refused to use guitars for the entire album. To make the album work better without guitars, they treated the piano like a guitar - using amps built for guitars. They used a 1x12 amp to record the piano. This is a big difference from ours because while the original sounds much more powerful, since ours is recorded from the piano.
https://soundcloud.com/user-822226810/brit-hay-sowk
Separate Instruments
Vocals https://soundcloud.com/user-822226810/brit-hay-sowk-0002-audio-vocals
Piano https://soundcloud.com/user-822226810/brit-hay-sowk-0001-audio-piano-r
Bass https://soundcloud.com/user-822226810/brit-hay-sowk-0003-audio-audio-03
Tambourine https://soundcloud.com/user-822226810/brit-hay-sowk-0004-audio-audio-04
