DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

For each of the past three years, I’ve spent the Summer and Fall on rehearsing and recording drum parts (resulting in this CD and this one plus one tune on a sophomore release from the same guy — watch for a record announcement here shortly — and a couple other songs (1, 2, 3)).

I call my studio “Borrowed Time” in part because it’s a terribly clever play on words, but mostly because it was only a matter of months until my son was old enough to move into the space I’d been using as a live room. That day came last March. It was a great move for his independence and maturity, but not so great for my two-bars-a-day recording habit.

Nonetheless, the recording projects continue. I’m only about 40% through the material for my upcoming solo record, and my prolific friend Andrew has already written the material for his second CD, the drum tracks for which are due by the holidays.

Fortunately I had the foresight to pick up an electronic drum kit late last year, so I’ve been doing all the preproduction work in headphones. The plan was to rent a local room, move in for a long weekend, and do the final tracking on my acoustic kit quickly.

It would mean less tweaking, fewer takes, and hopefully a little more spontaneity.

Last weekend was the first of the season’s two recording sessions. I spent about two hours getting the drums in and up, about four more hanging mics, routing cables, and getting sounds.

Click to see photos from the 2007 sessions.

Needless to say, due to time constraints I had to make a few compromises. I didn’t sound-check my second snare drum or the other two of the three available snare mics, or spend a day experimenting with room mic position. But, having done this several times before, I think the sounds I got were better than in any previous session.

The kick-drum sound this time was far superior, due to a mic-positioning tip I picked up from Marc Senasac. (In a nutshell, the external or ambient kick mic needs to be a couple feet away from the drum, not up against the resonant head.)

I got bit by a few gremlins on my first day. One of the room-mic channels had an audible, pulsing white noise problem that I first attributed to the mic’s proximity to a breaker box in the corner of the room. However, moving the mic, then swapping the cable, had no effect. Then by happy chance I discovered that the channel was producing the white noise even with no mic plugged in. It was my first bad-channel experience, but no doubt not the last. I’ll identify it faster next time.

The other gremlin was pure user error — a couple new insert cables have a much tighter fit than I’m used to. Two of the four didn’t get plugged in all the way and caused some bad hum in my compressor chain. I diagnosed this quickly on the second day of the session.

In terms of gear, I had only three new pieces:

• PreSonus DigiMax FS 8-way preamp, replacing the Focusrite Octopre LE, which I never liked. In close listening tests, I can’t tell one from the other, but I liked two features of the DigiMax:
  1. stepped attenuators allow easy gain-matching of overheads and room mics
  2. each channel has an insert chain. The Octopre LE required me to patch compressed signals back in through an additional input, muddying the signal path and burning twice as many inputs as should be necessary.

• New TRS insert cables custom-made from Canare cable, replacing molded consumer-grade Hosa gear. I honestly doubt I’d be able to hear a difference here, but I needed more of these anyway and, what can I say, I’m a tweaker.
• a Crown PZM mic. I was hoping to get some interesting room sounds through this, but it sounded really trashy to me. It’s not a defect of the mic, which sounds beautiful for casual voice recording. More likely, it was a combination of the room and the placement. If I could have put this out of line-of-sight of the cymbals, or even outside the live room, it would have been much more interesting. But these options were not available, so I replaced it with a large-diaphragm condenser in case anyone downstream in the production process wants a mono, retro kit sound as an effect.

On the 2nd and 3rd days of the session, I knocked out four songs, one of which I’d literally never played before — the album’s cover tune, an old Paul McCartney song. Overall I think it went well, and it should be very interesting to hear how these songs get built up on top of the drums.

This was the input distribution (for my reference):

• Digimax FS
  1. Kick, internal (insert: RNC)
  2. Kick, external
  3. Snare, top (insert: RNC)
  4. Snare, bottom
  5. OH, left
  6. OH, right
  7. (dead)
  8. unused

• Mackie 1604
  1. Tom 1
  2. Tom 2
  3. Tom 3
  4. Tom 4

• Digi-002
  1. Hi-Hat
  2. Ambient LDC
  3. Room, left
  4. Room, right

Shopping list for the next session:

• Studio-style telescoping boom stand — one of the professional models with a 20-lb stand and a 10' boom
• I’m having my three Oktava MK-12s hod-rodded by Michael Joly.
• I want a new high-hat mic. Not sure which way to go here yet.
• I want a ribbon mic too; maybe a Karma K6.