Jamie (drums), Darren (guitar) & Colin (bass) turned up for the session which was booked from midday until 5pm. It was such a hot day that we had to have to windows to the studio to let in a breeze between takes, which is very unusual for this part of the country.
As we were just laying down guide tracks for the guitar, Darren had brought a practice amp that had a line out, so we could record it straight into the desk, without any bleed on the drum tracks. Colin's bass amp was set up at the bottom of the stairwell to make sure that there was no bleed from the drums or vocals. The vocal mic was put outside the room at the top of the stairs as normal, but we ended up not using it at all.
It took about 2 hours to set up, which is normal if mic'ing up drums which left us about 3 hours to get some tracks recorded.
We started with a track called 'Stomping Ground'. This is a fast metal tune (209bpm!), which starts with guitar, so I put down a click for the first 12 bars until the drums kick in. For some reason, the bass sound wasn't coming through very clear. Colin uses a Fender bass amp with an overdrive sound, but it was sounding really muddy. It's quite easy to add sounds later on, but almost impossible to remove them, so we ditched the overdrive for recording. If the songs require it, we can always run the bass track back through the amp to get the overdrive sound later in the process. We recorded two takes of this track to see which is the better. We really struggled with this track today. It wasn't sounding great and Jamie didn't feel his drumming was as good as it could be, so we moved on.
Next up was a track called 'Tomb', which is a heavy 140 bpm. I think it was here we started hearing a weird clapping sound on the snare drum tracks. It was odd because it wasn't on every drum hit, just every now and again. It is something that can be sorted with a bit of digital editing, but it's annoying because we couldn't really track it down. It wasn't the cowbell which was attached to the stand next to the snare mic and it wasn't anything else nearby rattling. Very odd.
Finally, we did a track called 'Heart Echo'. It still had the weird clapping on some snare hits.
It was a very difficult session today. The room was too hot, the sound wasn't right and the playing wasn't as good as it could be. At 4pm, the band and I had a chat about how we are going to improve things next time, which I think really must mean bringing in the whole band. As Colin pointed out, he gets some of his cues from the guys who weren't there today, which throws him off, and I think that's probably true of Jamie and Darren too. We decided to call it a day.
I think, sometimes, you just get those days where things don't go as well as you wish, and there isn't much you can do about it. Today was one of those. There is no rush, we can take as long as it necessary to get these foundations right. It's a marathon, not a sprint (etc etc).
As we were just laying down guide tracks for the guitar, Darren had brought a practice amp that had a line out, so we could record it straight into the desk, without any bleed on the drum tracks. Colin's bass amp was set up at the bottom of the stairwell to make sure that there was no bleed from the drums or vocals. The vocal mic was put outside the room at the top of the stairs as normal, but we ended up not using it at all.
It took about 2 hours to set up, which is normal if mic'ing up drums which left us about 3 hours to get some tracks recorded.
We started with a track called 'Stomping Ground'. This is a fast metal tune (209bpm!), which starts with guitar, so I put down a click for the first 12 bars until the drums kick in. For some reason, the bass sound wasn't coming through very clear. Colin uses a Fender bass amp with an overdrive sound, but it was sounding really muddy. It's quite easy to add sounds later on, but almost impossible to remove them, so we ditched the overdrive for recording. If the songs require it, we can always run the bass track back through the amp to get the overdrive sound later in the process. We recorded two takes of this track to see which is the better. We really struggled with this track today. It wasn't sounding great and Jamie didn't feel his drumming was as good as it could be, so we moved on.
Next up was a track called 'Tomb', which is a heavy 140 bpm. I think it was here we started hearing a weird clapping sound on the snare drum tracks. It was odd because it wasn't on every drum hit, just every now and again. It is something that can be sorted with a bit of digital editing, but it's annoying because we couldn't really track it down. It wasn't the cowbell which was attached to the stand next to the snare mic and it wasn't anything else nearby rattling. Very odd.
Finally, we did a track called 'Heart Echo'. It still had the weird clapping on some snare hits.
It was a very difficult session today. The room was too hot, the sound wasn't right and the playing wasn't as good as it could be. At 4pm, the band and I had a chat about how we are going to improve things next time, which I think really must mean bringing in the whole band. As Colin pointed out, he gets some of his cues from the guys who weren't there today, which throws him off, and I think that's probably true of Jamie and Darren too. We decided to call it a day.
I think, sometimes, you just get those days where things don't go as well as you wish, and there isn't much you can do about it. Today was one of those. There is no rush, we can take as long as it necessary to get these foundations right. It's a marathon, not a sprint (etc etc).
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