I’ve been working on an EP for a University Student; https://www.facebook.com/SebbCooper/ . His music draws from a very wide range of influences ranging from Romantic to Jazz and Metal; it is hugely complex but sound great. This recording session was put aside for tracking drums. We got into the studio at 17:15 and began to get ourselves comfortable, we plugged in the microphones and patched them into some different pre amps. Below is my planning for how to use the various outboard equipment that we have and what microphones to use.
As you would expect, it wasn’t quite this simple and a couple of work arounds were required, one of the API pre-amps wasn’t giving me any signal and the 1176 wasn’t giving me any signal on one side. Given our time constraints, I put the room mics directly into the SSL desk pre-amps and then used the UAE 1176 plugin to emulate the effect I wanted from the hardware. This sounded great, giving a lot of tonal color. Other than that, all of the equipment worked absolutely fine, I decided to eq the snare top a bit on the way in, cutting a ring with a very tight q on the desk.
It took us a while to achieve the sound that we really wanted from the kit. We used a Pearl Export kit with a titanium, 14×6.5″ snare. We worked around the kit starting with the toms, the drummer gave them a tune to start with and then the composer and I spoke about the sound that he wanted and we asked the drummer to adjust the tuning of each tom and to remove some of the moon gel that he had put on them to get a bit more sustain. The snare took a long time to sort out; from the control room we asked him to try different things, tuning higher, lower, more moon gel, less. After some time I decided that I would go in and have a close look myself. I found the hole in the resonant head that was causing all the problems, this wasn’t what we wanted to find at all! There were no more 14″ clear heads in the store downstairs so I took a coated batter-head to try and make the best of a bad job. I re-skinned it and then tuned it as best I could given the thickness of the head. Eventually we could get a good crack from the snare but it took a lot of work, as you would have expected, it was slightly deader than would have been nice but it was acceptable and we didn’t have anything better.
Given the technicality of the piece we recorded it in sections, the drummer sight reading each section and coping very well with the changes of time signature and tempo, he played with a bass player to give some reference to where he was. Big shout out to Sam Brice for playing so well, sounded awesome.
Time now to get the rest of the recording dates in the diary. Looking forward to the next session, looking forward to finishing this epic EP.
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