Bang A Gong

Drums!  We did drums today!

Today was awesome!  I woke up, watched an episode of Psych on netflix, went to a chiropractor appointment and had a cute girl send electric shocks through my back, came home and watched a few episodes of Lie To Me, went to a job interview, came home and cued up Cowboys of Porridge for drums.

I sent Trip a few texts asking for advice on drum mic placement and as I finished prepping the room Kory showed up.  I offered incense, beer (not wine) and candles, and we got busy setting up drums.

Kory setting up his drums for the first recording session

First song I set up was Two Bowls of Porridge.  I figured, start at the start.  Silly me, apparently I hadn't emailed Kory that song!  We checked levels and moved onto Dead Man's Curve instead... the last song on the album.  If you ain't first you're last, right?  It was actually just coincidence.  DMC happened to be next song in the list of "recently opened sessions" on StudioONE.  

We moved onto DMC and after some piddling around with what Kory was going to play, we decided to be unhappy with the drum sound.  Kick sounded great, overheads were good, room mics were whatever, not much different from overhead really, but the snare wasn't doing it.  Kory tightened up the snare and it sounded better but it still wasn't there so I hooked up a shure SM57 and it was at least there.

Kory nailed Dead Man's Curve with minimal difficulty and after a quick run through to make sure he liked everything he played we moved onto Tears on the Pavement.

Tears proved a little bit more challenging than Dead Man's Curve.  But not for the reasons I would have expected.  The drum loop I programmed for the intro to Tears is... unconventional at best.  It's got some rim shots on the up beat... it's just weird.  I don't write drums the way a drummer would play them usually... I'm not a drummer.  I write drums just to have things on beat with what I'm playing, so they usually come out weird.  When we play live, all I listen to are hi-hat and fills.  Having something weird to work with and me telling him "Play whatever you want" made things weird for him.  But he came up with a cool syncopated drum beat for the intro and I told him to just go ahead and keep it upbeat after that.  There's a part towards the end where the song goes form 75 bpm to 90 bpm though and it's not a slide and there isn't a count in, it's just very abrupt and Kory nailed it like it was nothing.  I was so impressed and the song really rocked out after that.

Kory laying down some mean side stick on Tears on the Pavement

After tears we layed down Mowin' the Shoulder.  It was getting to be late and as much as I wanted to do a really rockin' song I figured we could lay down the songs that were mostly side stick tonight and not piss off my neighbors and do to the more up-tempo songs tomorrow.  We went over Mowin' a few times and Kory was unhappy with what we played a couple of times per part and he kept apologizing.  He's such a sweetheart.  With reassurances that it was totally cool for him to do as many takes as he wanted we moved on and tracked the whole song and it came out really nice.

With the three songs down we started listening and I really wasn't feeling the drum sound we had achieved, but it was still raw, no reverb, no eq, not even panning, so I moved all the drums to one bus and found a "DRUM BUS" present in StudioONE and oh my... how things changed.  The drums which I was satisfied with previously suddenly became superb.  Before you could tell they were recorded separately from all the other instruments and they sort of stuck out.  There was "to much room."  With a little reverb and compression everything came together and I didn't know I could feel so relieved.

After recording Kory and I popped open a few more beers and had a brief conversation covering everything from disc golf to musicians we are compared to and with that he went on his way.  I went to Albertson's to procure breakfast for tomorrow.  Tomorrow we get started about 10:00am.  Trip will be here to supervise.  I'm feeling good about it.  

We have all day to knock out 7 songs and then the only thing left will be fiddle and vocals.  March is looking good.  

Until then, eat your oats...