Drum recording session tomorrow

Well this site is slowwwww. I figured I'd add some content. Maybe I'm prolonging the death of it, but whatever. Here's something to read.

The way I work usually [working as a small time conposer among other audio related things] is to write a bunch of tunes, have a drummer come over, I'll have a case of beer ready, and we'll track the drums for all the tracks while lightly drinking and then usually end up finishing the case after the fact. Since I work from home, alone most of the time I enjoy socializing when I get the chance. There is no shortage of drummers eager to get their name on a project so I go with whomever is available, though I do like to get this one drummer from my old band out for a visit when I can [the band ended when I moved to an island]. Anyways, there is a dude coming out tomorrow named Andrew Kent. He's a bit of a busy drummer, but for what I'm doing it's fine.

A breakdown of what I'm recording tomorrow

A rock and roll version of the Neo Geo arcade machine song
A few tunes for a 10 minute australian CGI animation called Astro Rising
A theme for an upcoming short thriller flick called "The Transaction"
An 8 second tune that is the theme for my segment on an internet music show

A little background on the internet music show. I have wanted to do my own internet show for a while, but honestly don't think I'd keep up with it. So when my friend started his, he asked if I could do a segment on his show doing tech stuff which is basically what mine would have been about anyways. So now I just put together short bits and they end up somewhere at least. When it gets going more I'll post links. There are a few already up but they're pretty bad because we did them all in one evening and I was squeamish in front of the cameras.

On to the drums. I usually have 12-16 mics up on my drum kit, which is a Drum Workshop Collectors' Series, and then I have a selection of different snare drums, but usually end up using my Ludwig brass snare. It's much better than what most of the drummers I work with own. I got it for cheap [compared to buying it new]. Anyways, it looks and sounds great, and I tune them. I can't drum well enough for recording purposes. 22" kick, 10 12 13 14" toms, and all my snares are 14" though I am going to try building one out of some oak I have laying around sometime this summer.

Anyways, I have all these mics up and then on a per-song basis I pick and choose which mics I am gonna use. It keeps things sounding different enough, and then I can of course mix differently or whatever I need. Working this way means I set up one drum session to set levels, and then import the session data into each of the tunes I'm working on that day and have a decent starting point and headphone mixes all set up. For tracking I use these cheap $60 Vic Firth isolation headphones. They sound pretty bad but they have great isolation. The headphone bus has a compressor on it, set to start compressing pretty quick [-35db I believe] at a 2:1 ration just to smooth things out. There's also a limiter to stop overloading the headphone amp, and there's an eq to roll the low end [120hz or so at 12db/octave] out of the cans because you get a lot more volume that way while not blowing the speakers.