Steal The Smile

Last week i began to record a band called Steal The Smile who are from the Reading and High Wycombe areas. Me and my friend Bridgeman went to one of their house's in Marlow to record the drums because they had transport issues with the kit. So we packed up all the gear into my tiny Ford KA and headed off!

After setting up the drum kit, we miced it up using:

• A Shure PG 52 for the kick drum - not my prefered microphone but its all ive got for now!
• A Shure SM57 for the snare drum
• A Shure SM58 on each tom - I took off the heads of these microphones after hearing from countless places that without the head on, they are essentially SM57's so decided to give it a try and i was pleased with the results, although I did not compare with the head on and off.
• A Rode NT5a for the hi hat
• 2 AKG C1000's for the over heads - not everybodys cup of tea, but ive always had good results using them and for now I have nothing better to use :)

We decided not to use any room mics because the room was pretty small. We used the pre amps from the M Audio Profire 2626 which apperently use technology taken from M Audio's award winning Oxygen pre amps. This was the first time id recorded an acoustic drum kit using these pre amps, I have recorded alot of drums before using the pre amps on an Alesis multimix 16 and can say these new ones on the Profire rock the socks off the multimix!

Tuned up the toms then we were ready to roll.

After tracking several takes on several playlists we decided that we had enough takes to comp a good drum track so headed home.

The guys came to my house the next day where I am alot more comfortable working to be honest. We recorded the bass guitar and all of the electric guitars, a good days work!

Meanwhile ive been editing the drums to line them up exactly with the grid on Pro Tools. In my mind, having super tight timed drums makes a demo CD sound one step closer to the professional studio sound. I have been trying to do most of the work with Beat Detective LE but sometimes have to get down and dirty and do it myself where the tool fails. Beat Detective LE does not work with more than one track of audio at a time (unlike its full version brother). But a clever man on the internet came up with a work around which I have been using, here is a link to it:

Beat Detective LE Multitrack Workaround

Doing it this way does slow down the workflow, but I believe it is alot quicker than me doing it myself, and lets face it. Im pretty lazy! So far I am 2 songs done on the drum editing, with 3 left to do, then we begin recording the vocals and putting the finishing touches to the songs :)



Will post the next blog soon with audio samples and my mixdown report!

Jamie x