DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

When my mom was in town a couple weeks back, I offered to take her to the band’s studio so she could see where I spend my Thursday nights. Later that evening, after we’d returned home, I admitted that the place is kind of a shithole. She laughed out loud.

She tends be understated, so besides the explosive laughter she said only “I think calling it a studio is a bit generous.”

In its defense, she saw it before Norm trapped the rats.

I think the full complement of rehearsal-studio artifacts can be easily found — empty food wrappers, empty beer bottles, strewn arrangement notes on random pieces of paper, carpets with unusual stains, dust, dirt, grime, half-assed soundproofing. I keep meaning to clean the place up, but then I figure the rats need a place to live, too. Besides, this way I can jot set lists in the dust on the bass drum.

The picture above is from a recent demo recording session. Sound quality took a distant second place to simply getting the thing done. So, I only set up three mics — two overheads and one inside the kick drum. I connected all three to my Mackie board, where I created a simple stereo mix (unity gain x 3, kick center, OH panned hard L/R) and bussed it to an outboard compressor. I squashed the mix pretty hard, then fed it into the recording rig (a standalone hard-disk unit) in the next room via some 50' speaker cables that we normally use for our monitors.

The result was cymbal-heavy, which is not surprising considering the position of the overheads. Next time I might try positioning the two mics out front, as rooms mics rather than overheads, where they’ll have a better chance of picking up the toms.

I’ll post a clip of the drums if there’s anything worth listening to.