The Final Betrayal - Session 1 - 29 April 2012

This weekend, we started recording a new band called 'The Final Betrayal'.  Similar in style to classic metal bands such as Iron Maiden.  Facebook page here.

What interested me was their demo tracks, which feature fantastic musical hooks, great vocal harmonies, intricate guitar work and machine gun drumming.

The session was booked from noon until 5pm on Sunday.  Due to other commitments, only the drummer and guitarist were able to attend, but as we were only going to record some drum tracks, that wasn't a problem.

Before coming to the session, Jamie (drums) had packed his bass drum with a duvet to try and dampen the sound a little, but we found the resulting sound wasn't quite right, so had to remove the drum front, and put in a slightly less bulky towel.  This gave a much better recorded sound, but we had trouble with bleed from the bass drum being picked up by tom mics.

We ended up covering the bass drum and mic with the duvet cover, which you will be able to see in the photos from this session.  This also helped with my ears, as my control desk was almost directly in line of the drum, so I was getting the full force of Jamie's machine gun double bass drum work.  It's a good job it was raining, as the neighbours might not like what they were hearing as much as we did.  The studio is not completely sound-proof, so I'm sure there was some leakage :-)

Darren (guitar/vocal), was providing guide tracks for vocal and guitars, so we set him up at the top of the stairs, just outside the live room, to prevent his tracks bleeding onto the drum tracks.  For those of you who haven't been to the studio, there is a small landing at the top of the stairs, just outside the studio door, where we put the naughty children, and also the vocalist, for tracking sessions.  There isn't much room there, so after his amp, pedal board, vocal mic and amp mic, there wasn't enough room for Darren!  Fortunately, he managed to remove most of his pedal board, which gave him enough room to stand next to the vocal mic :-)  It's a glass door to the studio, which makes communication with whoever is in the studio easier and of course he had a mic, so we could all hear him OK.

It took nearly 3 hours to get the gear set up and sounding great, which didn't leave a great deal of time to lay down some tracks, but we took enough photos of mic positions and desk settings to make it quicker for the next session.

Jamie had never used a click track, so we tried that on the second track, but unless you are used to it, a click can be quite distracting, so we dropped that idea.  There are a couple of places where a fill isn't quite in rigid time, but hopefully I'll be able to fix that with a bit of editing.

Thinking time?

How do you count in when you start a song?  Does the drummer clicks his sticks: 1,2,3,4 and off you go?  In a recording situation, it's possible, a tiny bit of the final click would be caught on the recording, so we have to count the 4 silently.  1,2,3 doesn't really give you enough tempo warning, so we went for 7 (1,2,3,4,1,2,3,- ).  I think Jamie has trouble counting in his head, as I can hear him say 4 quietly on the recording.  Might leave that bit in ;-)

The 3rd track we recorded, was 'World Of Lonely'.  This starts with a guitar arpeggio and no drums, so I set up a click to follow just for the introduction, which then drops out when the drums came in.  The no-drums-arpeggio feature also returns in the middle and at the end, so I ended up copying and moving the click around to give us something to work against when laying down the guitars proper in later sessions.

So, what did we get done?  We managed to get the drum tracks for 'We Are Electric', 'Distance' and 'World Of Lonely'.  We kept 2 takes for Electric, as we weren't sure which was the best.  I'm going to provide a reasonable mix for the band to listen to and we'll decide for the next session which to keep.

You can see more photos from the session here