The Vorga

Samanas!
Embedded below is a mix combining a thing we did with the Samanas and the recording I made of Maduka and Kate. The quote of last night's rehearsal was:
"Oh, somebody tuned these drums." -- David Wolfe

Andrew Bellware with Lily Kinner. The goofier version of this picture had my pick in my mouth.

 Lily played the Twin Reverb. The Twin makes a nice bass amp. I think maybe we need to experiment with the microphone placement to get a bit more of the mids and highs on it.
The isolation on the microphones was tremendous. I don't know why. I mean seriously, I have no idea why the isolation was so good.

David Wolfe on drums.

Again, we're doing the "guitar player's perspective" of drums. In this recording that means the two Oktavas are about 30" apart and aimed at the kit. Or, wait, no, Lily and I went over this a lot. She has a better sense of distance. I think she determined that the mics were 26" apart from one another. Then they're about 30" from the beater side of the kick drum.

This is an attempt to show the location of the three drum microphones. See them? I thought not.

I did in fact record with the AKG C12A as a center microphone for the drum kit, but this mix does not have any of that mic in it. I used the Lindell preamp and again the isolation was... fantastic. Weirdly good. But it just had the kick drum in it and wasn't a sound we weren't getting out of the stereo pair of mics, so I muted the channel.

Lily Kinner playing through a Twin Reverb. Did I ever tell you the story about when Debbie Harry told me on the phone that her bass player would use a Twin Reverb and then she got very annoyed with me when I showed up with a Twin Reverb for him to play through? 

This recording is one of those dream-scape sorts of things. Sort of a space-rock arabesque. Of course, the Doors song "The End" does that kind of sound and it's used at the top of Apocalypse Now, which is the feel of what we're doing maybe with The Imaginary Opera.

A bird's-eye view of the mic setup for the drums. The perspective is funky but the two Oktavas are actually on the same imaginary plane that the kick drum head is on. You can see the C12A is on a different plane would would likely make me want to time-shift it if I were inclined to use the sound of it.

The recordings this week have been quite inspiring. I've learned a lot about how to do an imaginary opera.

Greg Bartus, the master of space rock. 

Greg played through his Deluxe clone which sounds very, very sweet.
Did I mention that the bass (on a Twin) went through a Rode NT1A and then a Lindell preamp?
We're recording at 48kHz and hitting the M-Audio 2626 as A/D.
Coming up: on the Samanas Bandcamp page will be various other pieces we worked on. Man, I have to practice rhythm guitar.