I helped Russell schlep all his stuff over to Tony's house and get the computer and preamps set up. Tony's drums were set up in the usual practice area, an unfinished basement room with carpet on the floor and four-foot-tall gobos. The control area was just outside the walled-off drum area. We turned around the gobo in front of the kit so that it reflected insteaded of absorbed.
We set up a Sennheiser 421 in front of the kick drum, about three feet back and about even with the top rim. We started out using two MXL 603s small-diaphragm condensers in a modified overhead configuration: one pointing straight down over the snare about three and a half feet up and one over the floor tom pointing at the snare. We tried to keep them equidistant from the snare and the kick.
We tried to get some levels and immediately determined that the M-Audio DMP3 preamp couldn't handle the levels from the overheads. Even with the pad on the pre engaged and the gain all the way down, they were clipping. We ran them through the ART DPS preamp and the 421 through the DMP3 and everything was hunky dory. We recorded a few test passes of the drums and listened back. To our horror, we noticed random slippage in the tracks. The kick and overheads started in sync and then began to drift producing an unsettling phasing sound and finally a weird delay. But it was getting late, so we called it a day.
March 14.
We decided that the cymbals were too harsh and shrill, so we moved the overheads up higher by a foot or two. This helped a bit, but we still weren't really happy. Tony also had some issues with his toms. Each hit produced an annoying (to Kevin, Russell and I at least) BOIIIING, so we cajoled him into retuning and damping the drums a bit. Finally we ended up moving the overheads out front in the same plane as the 421 but about six and a half feet high and pointed at Tony's head. We found that the 421 by itself was capturing the entire kit very well and just a touch of the overheads added some nice "air" to the kit, especially the snare. The track slippage (or as Kevin refers to it, "the ghost") was still with us, but we forged ahead.
Kevin decided to use his Bassman 50 for the first couple of songs. We thought that the guitar-like growl of the tube amp would be better suited for these rockers than his usual GK head/Sonic 15 setup. I wanted to try using a Studio Projects B1 large-diaphragm condenser to mic the cabinet but once again, the output of the mic was too much for the DMP3. Russell had me keep moving it back and by the time it didn't clip, it was eight feet away from the amp. The gain on the pre was all the way down and I was sure it was going to sound like ass and have a bunch of bleed. To our surprise, it sounded quite good, with very little bleed from the drums. (We also tried, and immediately rejected, close mcing with an SM57.) We spent some time with Kevin's amp and pedals, rolling off the bass on the amp and trying to get the levels and fuzz setup on his distortion pedals. Things were going along well, but "the ghost" made it impossible to get an accurate idea of what was really going on. Russell messed around with some buffer and SPDIF settings to no avail before we called it quits.
March 21.
After spending all week poking around Internet discussion boards and forums and e-mailing tech support about the sound card and digital preamp, we returned to Tony's house with Service Pack 4 for Windows 2000 and updated M-Audio drivers. After jumping through hoops, we fired up the recording software, Sonic Foundry's Vegas, and found that absolutely nothing had changed. Dejectedly Tony, Kevin, and Chris went upstairs to watch basketball. Russell and I hooked up a drum machine and replicated the problem without mics. We were able to determine that it was the digital signal coming from the ART that was randomly slipping. After trying every option we could think of for the sound card and Vegas, I stumbled across a solution. When I turned off the "Show Wave Forms" option in Vegas, the tracks were perfectly in sync. We ran several tests to verify. Everyone had gone home by that point and Tony was going to bed, but we were on our way.
March 28.
We started tracking Da Glo Me tonight. As we listened back to the first take, "the ghost" reappeared. The only difference was that it took two minutes to show up instead of 30 seconds. Dejectedly, we all headed home.
April 1.
I showed up to Tony's house with a demo version of a new software, Tracktion. I had played around with it at home on a laptop and had been impressed with its intuitive user interface and workflow. The installation on Russell's machine was a snap and I repeated the drum machine test of last week. Everything synced beautifully. I recorded four and a half minutes of drum machine; it was rock solid. After calling Russell to give him the good news, I paid for, downloaded, and installed the full version. We were ready to actually get something done on Sunday. Tracktion to the rescue.
return to P'elvis recording diaries
