18/01/2010 - Week 3eeeeenz!

For this weeks recording lesson, we recorded some drums

For the session, we had our drummer Arran Hartley come in for the day and record a couple of drum tracks for us. He did the drum tracks "Edge of Darkness" and "Words Unspoken" which was quite handy as those are 2 of the main tracks for the album

Arran brought in his own cymbals and snare drum to replace the studio own ones (so the kit sounded a bit better than it does)

We also hooked up the compressor and ran the drum signals through the compressor and getting a much nicer sound for the recording. For the microphone set up, we used as follows:
Kick Drum - AKG D112
Snare - Shure SM58
High Hat - Shure SM57
Tom 1 - Sennheisser E604
Tom 2 - Sennheisser E604
Overhead Left - AKG C1000s
Overhead Right - AKG C1000s

We had a bit of a problem with the initial set up as we originally had a Shure SM57 on the Snare drum but the microphone didn't work so I suggested using a SM58 which proved to be a good suggestion as the snare sounded quite good. Also, We had the kick drum mic resting upside down on a cushion on the inside of it. This proved to work very well as it picked up a nice kick tone.

The tom mics were clipped into place and placed very closely to the toms. We has the high hat mic placed on just above the top plate pointing down at it so it picked up the full hit of the high hat. With the snare, the mic was sat sideways, almost pointing along the surface of the snare. This helped to maximse the clarity of the snare sound from each hit. Finally was the overheads. They were placed directly over the top of the right and left side of the hit, so like, on the right side, it was over the tom and cymbal where as on the left it was over the high hat and cymbals.

When we got down to recording, we had Jon sitting in the main control room playing the song on guitar and recorded arran playing along to it as thats the way Arran prefers to record. We tried to get some drums to older tracks re-recorded but due to technical problems with the Mac, we couldn't get the project onto the desktop and open it from there as when we tried to open it from my iPod, it would do a system overload everytime the track would drop from the intro to where the band came in.

As previously mentioned, the 2 tracks we did get recorded were "Edge of Darkness" and "Words Unspoken". We wanted to do a third track, "One Moment", but Arran couldn't get it right so we had to drop that one for the day.

Hopefully next time we'll get the rhythm guitars recorded to the drums and then get the rest done over the course of time.

Silence speaks louder than words...
Stevie.D
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