Drum Tracking

On Saturday the 12th I tracked drums for my upcoming album with Jonathan DeBem playing drums.

I had the drums in live room 1, the rest of the band playing in live room 2, and the amps in live room 3.

My channel list is bellow:

1. Kick In                   D6
2. Kick Out                D112
3. Kick Further Out  M147
4. Snare Top             M201
5. Snare Bottom      Beta57
6. Tom 1                   MD421
7. Tom 2                   MD421
8. Tom 3                   MD421
9. Overhead L          C414
10. Overhead R         C414
11. Room 1 L            U89
12. Room 1 R            U89
13. Room 2 L            Royer R121
14. Room 2 R            Royer R121
15. Mono Room       C414
16. Bass                     DI
17. Keys L                  DI
18. Keys R                 DI
19. Acoustic DI         DI
20. Electric DI           DI
21. Electric Amp       SM57
22. Vox 1                    SM7b
23. Vox 2                    SM7b
24. Vox 3                    U87

I had 5 musicians playing and they each had an individual stereo in ear mix delivered to them in their headphones.

The load in was the day before and took several hours to set up. We had a separate desk brought into the control room of the studio because the SSL already in there didn’t have enough inputs and outputs for the size of the session. For this reason we put a DiGiCo SD8 and a DiGiCo D2 rack in the studio and patched into that. This allowed me to very easily make adjustments to the bands in ears so they could all hear better and therefore play better.

We tracked for a couple of hours before lunch and then went straight through for the rest of the afternoon tracking a complete pass of the whole album in one go once. So far I have gone through only a couple of the takes but they sound great, particularly the room mics and the kick drum.