Supposed to get together with Ron and Kieth C. to set guitar sounds and my bass sound. KC had the flu, so we postponed until the following Tuesday pending Keith’s health.
Posts Tagged ‘Apple Logic Pro’
Saturday June 20
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009Thursday June 18 – an email I sent to some of the guys:
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
This is my quick and dirty rough mix in Logic – nothing Final.
I used all mics in the mix except the TOM mics, but I would like to use them in the final mix if we can fine tune the mic placement. The tom mics actually do add some nice attack and presence when they are hit.
This is fun! My first time mixing more than 2 tracks for drums since I only own a 2 Ch interface.
I used a little compression and EQ on each track, and a touch of reverb on the sanre track and panned it left a hair. Also ran a drumeset compression on the bus mix.
I think drums can be the biggest challenge in getting to sound good, especially vintage kits from the early 60s. They have their quirks, but they also had mad character!
Sound file:
Click here to hear the recording from this session.
Wednesday June 17 – an email I sent to Ron and Dave:
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
I played around a bit with those drum tracks through my headphones in Logic… The 58 on the floor tom has to go. It’s picking up a weird resonance form the bass drum. When the floor tom is hit it sounds OK, but the rest of the kit ambient sound does not sound good through the 58.
As Ron suggested I think we will try our tiny condenser pencil mics on the toms, hopefully that will give a more focused detailed sound. I have always preferred condenser mics to dynamics for just about anything anyway. That would free up some 57s to put on the guitar cabs, and maybe even a 57 to mic the bottom of the snare for extra sizzle.
The 57 on the rack tom sounded fine, but I still think I would like to retune those toms. The bottom heads are off enough to cause some ugly dissonance.
Also we need to balance out the overheads. When I sat down at the kit tonight I saw that the overhead- drummer right – was out of place – damn cheap stands move too easy. Don’t know if that happened before or after the test recording, but if it was before, that explains what I hear.
I think it would be wise to try to work on this a bit more, perhaps just Ron and I can experiment and Dave can fine tune the next time he is here. I know we can do better than what we got, although it wasn’t bad at all.
One thing about headphones is I can hear these subtle details like a mic out of place, but they sure don’t move air like a real speaker – the bass drum doesn’t slam you with headphones like a monitor does – so now I see why both are important.
Joe
Tuesday June 16 – Day 1 – Drum Set up and Test:
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Ron and drummer, Dave met at my house so we could set up. We moved my 60s Gretsch drumset out of the way (too jazzy sounding with the heads I have on right now) to make room for the kit we will be using for the recording – a vintage 60s Pearl kit that sounds great. We’ll be using the hardware and cymbals from my drum kit as well as one of my vintage Ludwig snares – a 1967 Supraphonic. I read somewhere that that is the most recorded snare drum in history. That seems appropriate for this project – plus one for the statistics.
Dave set up the drums and tuned the heads while Ron was setting the recording rig up. Meanwhile I set up the mic stands, chose the mics used, and ran the mic cables to the Mackie. Then we took a dinner break before going back into my home studio and continued with some testing.
The mics we ended up using were small diaphragm condensers as overheads set up in a stereo A/B configuration. We close miced the snare and toms with Shure Sm 57s and an SM 58 on the floor tom, since we were out of 57s to work with at that point. We put an Audio Technica 4033 on the bass drum, since we didn’t have a proper Bass drum mic. I wasn’t sure how that was going to turn out, but to my surprise that mic sounded great on the bass drum. We can EQ that to taste later in the mix.
Some photos of the set up: (pardon the blurry photos. I tried to get some photos without flash to capture the ambience and all I had at the time is my wife’s point and shoot camera).
-
- Ron “The Sultan” Tongue manning the board. My 60s gretsch kit in the background. Won’t make the cut – too jazzy with the heads I have on there. This is going to be a Rock and Roll record,…er CD.
-
- The set up, and my new bass poses for the shot as well.
-
- Close up of the kit – a vintage Pearl Kit from the early 60s that Dave and I found on Craigslist. It was $200 and we split the cost for a rehearsal kit so he didn’t have to lug his “good” kit to practice, but we like it so much it will be on the recording. They sound awesome for $200!!
-
- Greta – studio dog extraordinaire
-
- Ron – different perspective – still waiting for the files.
-
- The “Rig” – If Ron and I had a dime for every time we carried this up and down a flight of stairs…
-
- Wall of amps and dog toys.
-
- From Ron’s point of view.
-
- Ron and drummer Dave – transferring the test files to the MacBook Pro.
-
- From the drummer’s perspective.
-
- 24 channels in all its glory. So far we have used 6.
-
- My #1 Fan. Photo courtesy of my wife.
-
- Greta the groupie.
home recording project
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Hey All,
I have decided to record my four piece rock band in a home studio environment with yours truly playing bass. The guys in my band have been discussing the prospect of recording our tunes for quite some time now, and we finally decided to make some time to do it. We chose to do the recording at my house instead of using a studio so that we could take our time with the project and not have to worry about an expensive hourly rate at a professional studio. After all this is Home Recording Hub, right?
I have enlisted the help of Ron and some of his fine equipment to help with the tracking process. We are recrding with whatever mics we can beg borrow or steal – through his 24 channel 8 bus Mackie board into a 24 track Alesis ADAT hard disk recorder… and no we did NOT really steal any mics for this project:)
The goal is to get everything down on the Alesis, then transfer the files to my MacBook Pro and I will mix the project in Apple’s Logic Pro.
Hopefully I will have the time to keep you updated on the progress as the project goes fourth. If I can, I will try to provide you with pictures and video of the set up as well as sample audio tracks. We’ll see how close we can get to pro studio results with a little creativity and careful testing and listening.