Tuesday - January 6th, 2009: 11am to 2pm - Russ and I spent roughly three hours setting up his drum kit and getting drum tones. The time was also spent getting all the proper settings for the mic pre-amps. Drum tracking began the following day.
Wednesday - January 7th, 2009: 11am to 2pm - First rough Take(1): We spent time discussing the take and the parts of the song. Take 1-3 Russ experimented with different fills and beats. Then we recorded 4 alternate endings for the song. Not entirely happy with the snare drum sound, but we went with it. Thought we had enough information to make a master take of the song. On Friday, moving on to record the song, 'Pray'.
Thursday - January 8th, 2009: 1pm to 4pm - I spent time editing Russ's drum tracks into a master take. Take 3 was the best track...so I used this as the foundation. The Take 4's ending was interesting so I used that. Russ turned the beat around on itself in the finale four bars, which sounded good. I salt and peppered different fills from all the other takes into Take 3 and 4 to make the final drum track. I was happy with the results and called it a day.
Friday - January 9th, 2009: 11am to 2:30pm - Russ came back and we listened to the master drum track. We both decided that the snare drum sounded like garbage and changed out the snare drum and took a few more passes at the song. Finally got a good snare drum sound, but now we were getting a phantom reverberation from the Room mics and overhead mics due to the hi-hat cymbal. After hours of baffling behind the kit...having baffles falling down on us and the drum kit...wiping out mic placements---We decided to call it a day and proceed on Tuesday, the following week.
Sunday - January 11th, 2009: Noon till 4pm - After researching drum mic techniques over the weekend I decided to head back to the studio to perform some experiments. Rich Chiuppi and I re-baffled the room and change mic configurations around. One mic at a time, we finally got it. We are using 9 microphones on the drum kit. 1 kick, 2 snare (top & bottom), 1 hi-tom, 1 low tom, 1 hi-hat, 1 on the drum kit about head high, dead center of the kick drum...right over the hi-tom, and 2 room mics 6 feet high, 10 feet in front of the drum kit, forming an equilateral triangle. We made numerous recordings to make sure we set all the gear properly. I decided to use analog mic pres instead of the digital one Russ and I used on Wednesday of last week. No phantom anything...everything sounds sweet! We're ready for this coming Tuesday's recording session!
