Thursday, March 07, 2013

Penguins and You

Here are some things City Samanas did last night. This is just a rehearsal. I believe that there isn't a single piece we did here where we had any idea of what we were going to do before we did it. At least that might be true for me. In any case, the thing we're looking at here is the recording(s), not the performances. Click through to dig the grooviness:The songs have progressively more "stuff" on them. The Foot Hen song is all but dry. Those are just the raw tracks with panning and a limiter strapped over the stereo buss.
Then I added a drum submix buss with some additional compression on the next song.
Last mixes have a bit of reverb on the drums. With bigger compression. So this is a decent overview of what the raw tracks sound like, and then the various things I did in the way of mixing them.
There are a number of new or different ways we did of things:

  • The drum overheads are, in fact, overhead, and are the Ear Trumpet Labs "Edwina" mics in an X/Y pair.
  • I only recorded two tracks for drums. No kick drum microphone.

I didn't have my camera with me so you'll have to be satisfied with this X/Y pair.

  • The bass was put through the PA cabinet because the Twin Reverb was being buzzy. That is not our preferred solution however it did sound surprisingly good.
  • We used the new Jam Hub (bedroom) headphone amp. I fed one of the drum mics into it via an XLR adapter so that we could put a bit of gated reverb on the drums. That seemed to make people happy.
My feelings right now are that I (for the first time) wish I had used the kick drum mic. I feel derpy. Dave does not have a heavy foot to start with. But although I feel the rest of the kit has a good (albeit "old-fashioned" sound) the kick is a bit buried. So: next time we'll use a Rode NT1A on the kick and send it through the Lindell preamp.
I think I want to get the bass guitar mic a bit further from the bass speaker. We're not getting quite the midrange out of it that I think we're going after. I'm even punching a bunch of mids on the EQ on the Lindell.
Do I want even yet more separation of the drums from other instruments? Yep. I sure do.
Am I digging the sound of the Edwinas as overheads? I sure am.
The big takeaways: we still need more isolation for the drums. Also, we seem cool with the normal X/Y configuration (about a meter above the snare).  Everyone digs the headphone mix. We will add back a kick microphone.


2 comments:

gbartus said...

Next time let's aim our guitar amps away from Dave and let Darth Vader's kitchen help us out as it is supposed to!

Andrew Bellware said...

The trick is going to be getting the bass guitar out of the drumset. That's going to take some work. Ha!
Maybe we should come directly out of the preamp for the bass...
Actually, that's interesting...