This post has a long and a short version.
Short Version: The basic information, who, what, where, etc.
Long version: Details of our approach to these recordings
Average Read Time (Short Version): 2 Min
Average Read Time (Long Version): 8 MinSorry it's been so dead around here lately, we've put up some updates on our
Twitter account over the past few weeks, but haven't had anything major to write about, until now!
We're headed into the amazing
Dennis Riese Family Recording Studio at New York University today to record for a class run by a production legend,
Rod Hui. Rod was Brian's professor for a mixing lab when he was in college, so when he heard Rod was looking for bands to record this summer, we jumped at the chance to get into a studio with a large format console, a solid compliment of outboard gear, and a highly decorated producer.
We're going to be recording two new songs, "Bulletproof" and "Break The Mold". We've played "Bulletproof" live a few times, so some of you may know that one, but "Break The Mold" has never left our rehearsal room, so we're excited to be able to lay it down before Mike leaves for college. We haven't decided exactly how we plan to release these songs yet, a large part of the decision may depend on how the recordings turn out.
Our plan is to focus on nailing the drum sounds and performances while we're there, and do the rest of the parts back at Brian's studio like we did for the last record. There are a few reasons we're going this route. The first is the simple factor of time, we only have 4 hours to set up, record two songs, break down, and get copies of the session files made. The second is space and transportation: it would be impossible for us to fit a full drum set, a 4x12 half stack and head, a bass amp, guitars, and a bass into one car and still have room to carry the band members.
If we had more time we probably would have found a way to get all of our gear in, but because we only have four hours, it isn't worth it. Even if we came in with our amp settings dialed in exactly how we want them, trying to nail the perfect guitar sound, bass sound, and drum sounds would probably require at least 3 hours of set up alone. By focusing on the drums, we can utilize the most important aspects of the studio without over-extending ourselves and trying to do too much.
--Stop here for short version--Drums, more than any other instrument, require the kinds of tools you can only get at a big studio. The first, and possibly most over-looked, is the live room. For you non-studio people, this is the room where the drums, amps, and anything that's being recorded goes. It's separate from the control room, which is where all the recording equipment, like the mixing console, is. There are two reasons the live room in a full-size studio is important for drums, more so than any other instrument.
The sound of recorded drums on almost, if not every, album
ever made uses microphones placed out away from the drum kit, so that it picks up all of the drums. These mics are called "room mics", since they're placed out in the room away from the drums. If you think about it, this makes sense, when you listen to a drum set, do you put your ear right next to the snare drum to hear it? No, you stand back and listen to the kit being played as a whole. These room mics give perspective and depth to drum recordings.
The problem with room mics is that how good they sound depends on the acoustics of the room they are in. If you have a shitty sounding room, your room mics will sound like shit. Fortunately a full size studio should have at least a decent sounding room, which is one reason why it can help a lot to record drums there.
The other big advantage of using the live room in a full-size studio to record is the actual space, and how it's designed for isolation. Without this it's impossible to effectively pull off "live" recording. Live is in quotes because live studio recording is different than live recording from a show. Live recording is when all the instruments are being recorded at the same time, rather than doing the drums first, then the bass, guitars, etc. In order to record live you need to a) have the space to put all the people performing in the same room, and b) have a way to keep their instruments from being picked up in the wrong mics.
The big bonus of live recording is that the musicians all get to play together, feed off each other's energy, and perform the song as if they were on stage. If you just have one person sitting alone in a room playing to a metronome, it winds up sounding pretty sterile and robotic. However, if you can get the band together to play in the same room, using the metronome as a guide to keep them from straying way off tempo, all of a sudden they can push and pull the beat together and really add some energy and life to the recordings. If you get the drums recorded with this energy, it's permanently captured in the timing of the drum parts. If you then want to go back and re-record instruments, like we are planning to do, that feeling and groove will still be there so the other instruments will be able to recreate it during the re-recording.
Another problem with live recording is that you also need a way to keep the instruments separated from each other. If you've got a room mic up on the drums, but the guitar player's amp is in the room with it, you're going to get some guitar in the drum's mic. This unwanted sound from another instrument is called "bleed," and you want to have as little of this as possible. Preferably none at all. It's for this reason that big studios build "iso booths" (short for isolation booths) where you can put a guitar amp and close it off from the rest of the studio. With the guitar amp off in the iso booth, you won't be able to hear any guitar in the live room, this ensures that you don't get any bleed on the drum mics. You may ask, how does one hear the guitar then? Since the guitar is being recorded, too, it has mics on it, so you just take the signal coming from the guitar mics and send it to the headphones everyone is wearing while they record.
Besides the live room, the reason a full-size studio is more important for drums than anything else is the equipment. It's not that it necessarily has better equipment, although some of it may be, it's that it has a lot more of the better equipment.
Remember the example of sticking your head next to the snare drum that came up a few paragraphs back? Even though this isn't natural, if you can imagine doing it you'd probably come to the conclusion that, besides possibly going deaf, you'd hear a very strong impact. By placing mics close up on the drums like this, you achieve a sound with a lot of attack and presence. The mics that go right next to the drums are called "close mics", and you blend them with the room mics to balance the sharp attack with the perspective of the room to get a rich, full drum sound. In order to get a modern drum sound, most people will close mic all of the drums (toms, kick, snare) and even some of the percussion (china crash, ride cymbal). This can lead to sessions with a huge number of microphones set up.
The thing is that there's a bunch more equipment needed, like a preamp and converter, to get the sound from a microphone recorded into the computer. Now, it's relatively cheap to buy enough equipment to process one or two mics at a level that can compete with a professional studio. It becomes problematic when you want to use a top and bottom mic on the snare, an inside and outside mic on the kick, four tom mics, two room mics, some overheads, some close cymbal mics, and a mono room mic. Having enough gear to handle all that on a pro level is why you need to go to a full-size studio to record drums if you want to get the kind of drum sound we're after.
If we get the drums done as close to perfect as we can, using the tools of the big studio to their full advantage, we will be in good shape when we come back to Brian's. He has enough gear to handle at least two mics at a level competitive with the studio we will be in today, and since guitars, bass, and vocals can all be done well with one mic, two or three at the most, we should be fine recording them once we get back here.
We're going to use these songs as a test to see how we should approach recording for the next album. We've been talking about going to a big-name professional studio, like Avatar or Germano, to do drums for the next album for a while. It would be pretty expensive, but still much cheaper than doing a whole album there. Since we're getting these songs done for free, depending on the results, we'll be able to tell if it's worth the money to consider doing it again in the future.
