Day 1 Recording - Saturday 23/03/19 - He bangs the drums
Microphones
Audix DP7 7-piece microphone drum kit,
AKG C314’s placed as overhead microphones
Drums: Sonor Vintage Series Beech
13" by 9" Rack Tom
16" by 14" Floor Tom
18" by 18" Floor Tom
22" by 18" Kick Drum
Gretsch Black Nickel over Hand Hammered Steel 14" by 6.5" Snare
Gretsch Maple Renown Retroluxe 14" by 5.5" Snare
1950's Premier Brass Piccolo Snare
14" Hi Hats:
Sabian AAX prototype (top)
Zildjian Vintage (bottom)
22" Zildjian Constantinople Bounce Ride
22" Zildjian K Kerope Ride
21" Zildjian K Special Dry Ride
Tambourine
Took Bus to SAE at 8am in the morning to be there for 9. Met all the guys out the front of SAE and helped them load in the gear. Chris got out the recommended mics as I helped bring the gear in. They set the microphones up as I set up the desk. Initial error - should have stuck with 24khz and 44.1khz for recording, however a student (who will not be named) came in and told me it was better to do 48khz so I did. This was not part of scope and I had to go back and redo the whole session. Lesson - stick to the plan and don’t listen to all advice.
Set up all channels and inputs as per the scope, then went and helped Liam with the overhead mics and plugging the cabling in, also provided a copy of what was in the scope so they knew what the inserts were. Had Ben the drummer test the kit and play, we were in the room checking levels. Something seemed off. In C12 we were using preamp for kick and snare which takes up channels 1 and 2, however we had something routed to channel 2, therefore, we had to go back in and move every cable along once (after input monitoring and phantom power had been turned off).
Once we moved the cables over and Chris from the tech desk helped us with the preamp set up the kit sounded great. Had the drummer play and we adjusted the gain as necessary. Chris (from my team) taught me how to monitor and when to pull back the gain. Basically wait until you see it slightly clipping (going orange), then dial it back a little bit.
Ben took 4 goes to get the first song and 5 goes to get the second one. To be honest each time he could have stopped a take early, as they were brilliant, however I pushed for him to keep recording as the pressure was off. Safe to say the last takes were the best.
Finally we recorded drum samples which Chris loved but I found extremely tedious. Hitting the snare 3 different ways with 5 different types of stick is not my idea of fun, however, this was for another assignment as was very important. In hindsight I could have been more helpful, instead of just sitting there on my phone complaining, however, there was little I could do as it was just one giant recording.
We then packed up and finished around 4pm.
Lessons learnt - stick to the plan, channel one and two are for the preamp, be patient with the tedious process, know when to push your artist and when to back off, always share group work and have everybody rotate so we all develop as producers.
5 snares out of 5
Here are rough mixes of the work we did
https://soundcloud.com/user-74592038/cc2-drums
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