DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

November will be all about the music.

I spent Saturday rigging up all my recording gear, old and new, in the band’s rehearsal space. Ten mics, a mixing board, a small rack of effects, a laptop, a second monitor, and about 1000 feet of cable made for an impressive mess. I really enjoyed setting it up, so much so that Sunday I tore it down and brought it all home. I realized that getting good tones and consistent recordings will require leaving the gear in place for a couple weeks, and that’s not practical in a construction shop with a leaky roof and broken windows and daily foot traffic from the crew.

As of Monday morning, I’d taken over the spare bedroom, and was consistently getting the worst kick and snare sounds I’ve ever heard. I’m trying to do some inline compression, and of the five control knobs on each channel I knew how to use only one.

Tuesday morning, reviewing the owner’s manual for the mixer, I learned that my gain-setting procedure resulted in a signal that was too hot — not clipping, but distorted in other ways; for example, the mic inside the kick drum was clearly picking up the scraping sound of the damping materials against the batter head.

Tonight I made a mental breakthrough in understanding the compressor, and began getting decent sounds. Unfortunately this happened at about 10:15 PM, too late to really enjoy them (e.g. by indulging my Neil Peart fantasy one more time).

There is more studio-blogging to come…