First round of recording

This weekend was the first round of recording for the drums. Eric was playing on three songs, so I rounded up some gear and headed over to his place on Saturday.

The gear: My laptop with Nuendo for my recording needs, a MOTU 828 mkII 8 I/O unit for getting sounds into my computer, a Mackie mixer (borrowed from my bass player, Rick) for getting sounds into the MOTU, SM58 for the bass drum, SM57 for the snare, two overhead mics (Shure something or others that I borrowed from Fil), various cables and stands (some borrowed, some owned), one guitar, one amp, one pre-amp unit (borrowed from Matt) that I didn't use, and one set of Eric's drums (which sounded awesome!)

Saturday was primarily for setting up and doing run throughs on the three songs. This was also the day where I would likely find out whether or not my jury-rigged system was going to be able to do what I wanted it to. I had talked to my bass player, who does live sound occasionally as part of his job previous to beginning, and as a result had started developing some doubts as to whether or not I would be able to accomplish what I wanted to do. Well, not so much if I would be able to accomplish it but if I would be able to do it well. Because my mindset was that if it wasn't going to sound better than what I already had then why bother? Of course, I did have a back-up plan in place, that if I could not get drums recorded on my own that I might spring some cash for an engineer to come and do it for me, or even go into a studio to do it. Of course, I was hoping not to have to do this.

Luckily everything went very well and more smoothly than I could have hoped. Mostly (explanation to come). It took about and hour or so to get everything set up. I got signal from the mics all the way to Nuendo without much hassle. It's always a joy to see those little meter lights shining, indicating that you can indeed record sounds.

The one issue that we had, (and this wasn't even so much that it was detrimental to recording), was that I couldn't get a good sound out of my amp for Eric to play along with. Here's how that worked. I didn't want any guitar to be on the recording of the drums. The only reason I was playing was so that Eric would have something to play along to. So, I disconnected the speak in the amp, and plugged straight from the amp preamp into the board. The problem here is that you cannot get an adequate amount of volume without it sounding like garbage. It gets so distorted as to be indistinguishable from noise. I tried several different configurations of things to get it to work. By a certain point, all you're really trying to do is add volume without adding any more gain. I tried going straight from my amp to the board---no luck. I tried going from the pre-amp unit to the board---no luck. I tried amp to pre-amp unit to board---no luck. Imagine the worst guitar tone ever, and then imagine something that doesn't even sound that good. We were able to play through it well enough; I'm more concerned about how this will play out in the second round of recording, with someone I have never played with before and the possible addition of bass going on at the same time as well. This is something I will have to work on.

Despite that, I'd call the weekend a success. After setting everything up on Saturday, Eric and I just did a brief run through on the three songs to work out a few ideas/thoughts. Then Sunday we sat down to do the actual recording. It took us somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 hours to get all three songs down. That was for the drums, and then for a little extra percussion---cowbell in the chorus of one song and tambourine in the chorus of another.

It will probably be a couple weeks before the next round of recording drums. Hopefully that will also just be a one weekend recording session, but we shall see. Between now and then my job will be two-fold. First is to mix the drums for the songs Eric did. This will entail throwing some EQ on there and tweaking the levels so everything sounds balanced, and I hope to start that this week. Possibly even tonight, although I wouldn't mind a day off before beginning. Once I get that done, I'll throw some guitar tracks down.