STUDIO DIARY - Day 1 (Setting up the drums / Soundcheck)

Hoy,

What a shitty snow storm going on outside...well only 5 months left of this living in the land of ice and snow!

Yesterday, a day before today, Joonas entered to Rockstar Productions around 15 o'clock and set up his drums...changed his drum skins, tuned them and then the owner of the studio, Lari Takala, put on some mics for the drums.

 Everything almost done for soundcheck.

I think we have something like 15 or 16 tracks for drums:

Bass drum inside mic
Bass drum outside mic
Bass drum trigger

Snare from above
Snare from below(carpet)

tom
tom
tom
 
I think 3 overheads

2 or 3 mics for some additional cymbals like 1 for bell/splash, 1 for the main hi-hat (3 hi-hats overall in the set).

Then one pair of room mics few meters in front of the drums and 1 pair on the behind.


Might not be 100% accurate but it's the closest that I can think of.

Then we started to check the sounds and cut off some unwanted frequencies, some compressing and basic adjustments to make the overall drum sound clear. Snare sounded really tight and thin as wanted. Toms were really awesome...nicely tuned! Toms probably needs to be tuned few times during the recordings as new drum skins gets looser in the beginning.

Lari in the monitoring room.

We test recorded few takes without and with the guitar and click tracks and after few small adjustments and cable changes we were pretty much good to go!

Yesterday was only for setting up everything, creating Pro Tools projects etc... then the studio is not available for 2 days but on Sunday the actual recordings will start! Lari was there to mic the drums for us and help us with Pro Tools etc... but the actual recordings will be handled by the guys of Thaurorod while Lari takes some time off and attends 70.000 tons of metal cruise. We have the studio booked 'till 10th of December so should be plenty of time! We have 11 tracks to be recorded + possibly some additional cover song...any suggestions for a Thaurorod cover?????

So I guess 'till sunday then when it's time for some real action that involves rec button!

Take care!

Pasi