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George Kounnas
5/22/2013 8:00pm-12:00am | 5/24/2013 7:00pm-10:00pm
In these most recent sessions we took some big steps. We started miking and tracking drums. Jae had brought in Dom, a co-owner of the studio, to show us the ins and outs of mic choice and mic placement and the importance of knowing and labeling which mic is going to which input in the patch bay. We used a total of eight mics for the drum kit we were using; 2 AKG C 414s for our overheads, 2 Shure sm57s for the top and bottom of our snare, 2 Sennheiser MD421s for the rack and floor toms, a Shure Beta 91a for the inside of the kick drum, and an AKG D112 for the outside of the kick drum.
After we got all the mics set up and placed correctly, we went to the console and made sure we had a signal from each mic. Then we would dial in each mic individually. During this step Dom was explaining to us that he was metering at the same time; dialing the mic in just enough to where it hits where the green and yellow meet on the meter. Some instruments naturally produced a very strong signal and would peak so Dom explained that we would have to "pad" that signal. What padding does is it drops the signal a certain amount of dB(I believe 10dB) so that we can still get a clear signal without turning it down too much. Then Dom briefly showed us a quick rerouting step; sending the drum tracks to another part of the board so that we could mix the drum tracks with the other music the drummer was playing to.
After all of those steps were completed, it was smooth sailing from there. We hit record and let the drummer do his thing.
Once the drummer had finished his first track, Jae showed us the convenience of creating a playlist on the tracks in Pro Tools so we could do multiple takes and choose the best one. Then we concluded with breaking down the mics and other gear.
This session really showed the importance of preparation when recording a full band because just setting up mics took a great deal of time, as well as breaking it down.
