Eight heads of the snake

So, on Monday night, with the departure of our vocalist to Peru for a month or so, we finally set about organising the Korg D888 for some serious attempts at recording.

The first task was to unload Rick's Wharfedale KMD-7 drum mic kit and to attach the various pieces around the kit as necessary; one of the major benefits of having clip-ons (as opposed to microphones balanced in and around the place on various stands or dangled on strings from the rafters) being that the microphones won't get knocked and shunted sideways by any errant feet and/or instruments etc. This means that each time we enter the 'studio' there won't be any need to re-measure and re-align any of the mic distances, as they shouldn't ever move; the barest alteration can make an enormous difference ...

In an effort to keep the floor space as tidy and efficient as possible, we're utilising a large snake cable that's been cut and separated at both ends so as to allow the various sockets to reach their appropriate mics. The only issue we had with this was the need to get the KM3s capacitor stick mics above the kit, so we settled on using independent leads hung from the rafters for those.

These stick microphones also provided us some further bother until we realised that phantom power was needed for them to collect any sound; the fact of my having neglected to bring the manual along a major hinderance. With this activated however, we had all eight channels receiving ample input, as verified by the alighted peak meters.

Thursday night was spent tweaking the sounds that we were getting (eg. thickening the kick by adding low end and stripping out some high). Again, the capacitor mics caused us some problems in that even with nothing being played (their associated tracks merely armed) we were getting a whole pile of ambient noise. We eventually just trimmed the hell out of the tracks they were active on (until no ambient activity could be seen on the peak meter at all). Despite our initial concerns though, there was plenty of sound still being collected by them.

After recording several sample beats (playing them back through the PA for purposes of basic critique) and getting the foundation of the sound pretty well sorted, the next step on Monday night will be to actually record a couple of full drum tracks so that the guitar can then be laid over top, which'll hopefully give us a better idea of how and where the drums are going to eventually sit amongst a mix (of sorts).