For tracking drums we brought in the drummer from my band. He has future aspirations of being a studio drummer so he had a lot of fun! His kit is a signature pearl kit from the drummer from Slipknot. Since that kit has a more metal direction I replaced the snare with my brothers Chad Smith (Red hot Chile Peppers) Pearl snare. It had a much better sound for the kind or snare I wanted. Mike (The drummer) had a broken crash so we stopped by a music store that morning and bought a standard Sabian rock crash. His other brighter “Big” crash is also an older more used Sabian. When we began to sound check hi hats we were catching a high pitch ringing noise so Sasha let us use his awesome hi hats! Again his help was great! Ass for the kick, I was not very pleased with the sound, after some compression and EQ I am going to see what I can do with it, but I may have to sound replace it. We’ll see. I am very excited to begin editing and then to come back and do vocals.

I did have one issue when checking the overheads. The right OH would come through so I did all the basics. Checked everything, replaced the cable but I just moved everything to a different channel and pre channel and it worked! So problem solved.

The talk back and headphones went great and worked exactly as planned!

For microphones I used SM-57 for snare, Audix D6 for kick, Audix overheads (condensers) the name escapes me right now. Audix d4 for the floor tom and the little silver mic for hit hats. the name is also escaping me. I used a Mono room mic as well using the audix i5 for that.

TRACKING DRUMS!

FUN FACTS and BASS!

There is a part in the song were we needed slide guitar, but we forgot our slide at home, so we we used an Ipod touch as a slide! worked great. Also for bass I just went D.I. to the pre and added some compression just for tracking and was going to mess with the tone later in editing. I EQ’d a little on the vintech but was going to do more in Protools. The bass in a 1980’s charvel with newer upgraded active pickups. 

First off I will start with the gear we used. I borrowed my dads gear for a better sound suited for the alternative rock genre. We used an Epiphone Hollow body guitar with custom wound H-90 pickups. For an amp we used a modded Epiphone Mini stack. The Cabinet has an 12 inch eminence speaker For pedals we used a Boss EQ, a Blackstar dual channel tube distortion and a Boss DD-3 delay. We experimented with a tube screamer, but felt the tone was better without it. 

For microphones we used an SM-57 and Sasha was nice enough to let us use his ribbon microphone! I was very happy with the help he gave me. We mic’d the SM-57 at about 45 degrees off axis mid cone of the speaker, and the ribbon around mid cone also.

The tracking went pretty quickly and didn’t run into any problems, I made scratch drum tracks with reason for us to record with and they worked perfectly. The tone came out pretty warm and I was happy with the day overall. 

TRACKING GUITAR!