DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So the plan was that I’d host a 2-day recording session for my old bandmates.

My wife would be 38 weeks pregnant at the time. This is no minor consideration, as anyone whose wife has ever been 38 weeks pregnant can attest. Extrapolating from the strength of her nesting instinct a few months prior, we realized it would be a bad idea to try to host this session at home. There’s no low-impact way three guys can record music in the basement; she’d be uncomfortable and disturbed, which is generally considered a bad thing by all the experts (where by “experts” I mean spouses of women who at any time have been 38 weeks pregnant).

Fortunately my band’s studio is just 10 minutes away. There, we’d have lots of space to work and the freedom to make as much noise as we want. But once I’d set up my gear there I realized we’d be miserable (for a variety of reasons noted previously, so the last-resort option came to be the only option.

Next I needed gear. My band bailed me out in world-class style: Norm offered his entire inventory of vintage guitars, amps, and combos. One Dave offered a nice acoustic guitar. The other Dave offered his Marshall TSL (“triple super lead” !) head and a 4x10 cab. Suddenly I had more guitar gear than I knew what to do with.

I would also be recording vocals. Ask 10 engineers the best way to record a vocal and you’ll get 10 different answers, each citing some esoteric microphone and tube-preamp combination, plus a complicated chain of compression, EQ, expansion, and pitch-correction devices. I’d have no such gear, but I’d be recording vocals anyway, one way or another. My total investment in a high-end vocal chain amounted to $15, for a pop filter. But: it’s a really nice pop filter.

I bought a Shure SM-57 too. I don’t like to use them on my drums, because they’re too big to fit anywhere, but I figured any real engineer would have at least one (if not six) in his bag. I’m not a real engineer but to the extent that I can afford the bag of gear, I hope to sound like one.

The Marshall gear went into the nursery, the same room the drums had occupied for six weeks. I lined one corner with seat cushions and Auralex foam, pointed the cabinet into the corner and dropped two mics over the top: my new SM57 and an old Beyer M-380, a big bidirectional mic that has great, round low-end response and a distinctly different sound than the 57.

In the next room, we set up a large work table to hold my laptop — it’s still astounding to me that a midlevel G4 Powerbook can drive a recording studio — a spare CRT, Andrew’s nearfield monitors, and my rack. The idea was to get some separation between the console and the tracking room. Or, in another sense, to turn the nursery into an iso booth for the guitar cab.

I wired two C-1000S mics on boom stands, for vocal and acoustic guitar. If I were a real engineer I would have sound-checked two or three other mics for both applications, but we wouldn’t have time.

Finally, I ran all the mic cables from the nursery into the den, and a daisy-chained series of headphone extension cables from the den into the nursery: instant recording studio. We had no window between the rooms, but we found that shouting through a closed door worked just as well.

Although this session was primarily to record Steve’s guitar and vocals, Andrew brought 11 strings worth of Ken Smith basses, which I photographed just because they look so cool.