basic things i learned from GS members

[mark.james]

i just recorded some demos of my band in my drummers living room, and i am very happy with the results, though they are not stellar i did a few things i hear mentioned over and over here and was able to improve my recording technique-

1. i clocked the crappy digimax to my 192io ... i felt like i was using a completely different pre... the sound stage was way bigger than before. i always thought i didn't have the ear to hear the difference between converters and clocks and said f*** it, but this time i broke out the $5.00 for a toslink cable and it made a lot of difference

2. i used a room mic as well as overheads.. what was i thinking all these years? i never thought a room mic would make such a difference.

3. i used the close mics to accent the room and overheads, not the other way around.. a big drum sound comes from the size of the room... duhhh .. no wonder all of my drum recordings sounded so lame. even though we were recording in a living room, it made a huge difference

4. i bought a stereo bar for the overheads... $16.99

5. i checked the phase of each drum mic after we were done tracking.. why doesn't the kick sound better? because it's out of phase, dummy.

thanks for the great reading, and reiterating the basics so me and other slutz can annoy our wives/girlfriends with slightly better sounding demos that they will hear 5-10 times a day until the next tracking session.

mark

[Darm]

Try using recorderman drum technique. It made a huge difference with my drum recordings...

[mark.james]

thanks for the suggestion, i'll give it a try! i always thought the minimalistic approach to recording drums wouldn't work for the rock music i tend to record, but after the last few tracking sessions i'm beginning to use less close mics and more room/oh