I've been working on this record/project since this past January - God Candy is the album name. I thought I might document some of the tracking etc. Mostly for me LOL in case I need to refer back to it but also in the rare event is of interest to others who write/record etc.
The first 7 months were working in a new drummer, tightening up arrangements for existing songs and writing the remaining songs, which is 12 songs total. While this was going on I was recording each rehearsal, taking notes, rinse & repeat. The last couple of months have been prepping for drum tracks. To accomplish that and to simplify, we decided to record scratch tracks to a click minus drums.
I did most of that tracking during the first week of August, then had a couple members fill in a few blanks so that we had just enough so the drummer could play along (also with a click). I did work harder than normal when I did scratch tracks because I wanted them to raise/maintain the bar and to hopefully inspire all of us to meet that bar.
We did the drum tracking this past Sat/Sun, I carried three racks + stands + mics + cables + snake over on Friday and spent the day micing everything up. The control room is the bass players bedroom which gave me complete isolation from the rehearsal building which is about 75 feet away in the back yard.
So I'll start with the equipment setup, then possible in later posts (assuming I continue), I'll document other steps as we go and/or a potential sample or two of the resulting drum tracks followed by the full release sometime before Christmas hopefully.
The routing sheet... I spent a good amount of time with all the logistics and routing long before tracking day. The goal was to be able to unload, setup, mic up, wire up and everything just work. Amazingly, except for a single mic being out of phase, it all worked first try. Yay. I had planned to be able to track the entire band as you can see in the routing sheet, but that need didn't arise.
The sound card setup is:
FFUFX, FF800, UA 4-710D where the FF800 and 4-710D are linked to the FFUFX via ADAT1 and ADAT2 - I ended up with about ~26 available simultaneous inputs with a mixture of clean and colored preamps. Radial J48 to get the bass from the room to the control room, then into the UA tube pre with it's 1176 compressor circuit set to fast in order to smooth and round the tone a little on the way in.
One other thing I did was to name the inputs to match the instrument from end-to-end. IOW, Kick In is channel 3 and it's named Kick In in TotalMix and also aliased in Reaper. I then saved both Reaper and Total Mix routings and naming as templates making it more difficult to plug the wrong thing in the wrong channel.
Bedroom temporarily converted to a control room. I basically lived in this spot for 10 hours a day Sat/Sun.
Drum setup, It's a 20 or so foot room with 12 foot ceilings or so - I was a little concerned about the squareness but due to size and the amount of gear and stuff all around the walls, it turned out to be a non-issue. I ran headphone mixes through the sends on the 24x8 snake and plugged those into CMOY headphone amps so the drummer and bass player had their own stereo mixes coming from RME TotalMix.
Roughly, 14 mics for drums - much of that choice was because it was a one-shot opportunity and it's easier to mute later than wish I had something I didn't. In the past I've always recorded drums with 4-6 mics so this was a treat.
Initial thoughts after recording drums drums, they turned out great. I placed the overheads 46" from the snare and made sure all three were exactly the same distance from snare. Also both sets of room mics were measured and placed so that each pair (L/R) were also exactly the same distance as their L/R counterpart. This surely paid off since the only polarity switch I had to throw was for the one miswired cable on one of the room mics. I spaced the top/bottom snare mics well enough that they did NOT need their polarity reversed.
As of today, I've completed any needed drum edits and the bass player is now overdubbing any tracks he doesn't feel are keepers from the tracking session. Then we'll begin replacing the original scratch tracks (as needed) with the final tracks, then any fluff/creative stuff, then mixing.
__________________ Music is what feelings sound like.
Last edited by karbomusic; 09-01-2017 at 05:39 PM.
Heh heh, I can tell this is a project of love Karbo. I don't think I've ever seen a project like this done this way. Definitely a passion of love.
So you had no individual mics on the toms?
You really planned this in a big time way, and since it's a group project and everybody is willing, I think it's a great way to do this. Your attention to detail is pretty rabid, which I think can only be done under these circumstances.
Incidentally, what's under the rug, cement, a wood floor on joists, or something else?
You might have mentioned it, but I missed it, are these original tunes.
Humm, it's looks like maybe one of the guys has hemorrhoids. Oops, sorry about that.
I don't think I've ever seen a project like this done this way.
I've done it this way since I lost the ability to record drums at my place. It's the best I've been able to come up with.
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So you had no individual mics on the toms?
Just on the floor tom, the TLM is picking up most of the rack toms but as far as adjusting individual toms track wise, no, didn't do that.
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You really planned this in a big time way, and since it's a group project and everybody is willing, I think it's a great way to do this. Your attention to detail is pretty rabid, which I think can only be done under these circumstances.
Since I basically had to pack a chunk of my home studio up and take it there, and since keeping five of us in the same place at the same time for any worthwhile length of time can be like herding cats, I knew I could not miss anything where I'd have to drive back home for something I forgot, have to troubleshoot for more than 2 minutes LOL or worse, dork a track up and not realize it until I'm back in my studio.
I will say this is the cleanest, quietest, trouble-free "guerilla drum sound" I've gotten, that was a nice surprise after all the worry something might go wrong.
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Incidentally, what's under the rug, cement, a wood floor on joists, or something else?
It's a cement floor which I'm used to.
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You might have mentioned it, but I missed it, are these original tunes.
They are, fairly equally spread between three of us where each of us mostly wrote/sing 4 songs or so each.
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Humm, it's looks like maybe one of the guys has hemorrhoids. Oops, sorry about that.
And he said it was his back!
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I'm really looking forward to hearing this Karbo.
I'm also very jealous.
I'm glad to be able to but things can change so quickly I know I shouldn't fart around; I'm no spring chicken either. Everyone says we sound like every 70s rock band all at the same time but more modern. Not sure I know how to take that but I kind of liked it.
__________________ Music is what feelings sound like.
Last edited by karbomusic; 09-01-2017 at 07:55 PM.
Thanks Insub! If I suddenly disappear, you'll know they didn't come out well.
Here is a snip from one tune of drums. It's all the tracks including both sets room mics as recorded so no processing except I knocked a couple of dB off the top with a limiter and I think I panned the high hat a little, otherwise straight tracks, faders at zero.
__________________ Music is what feelings sound like.
Last edited by karbomusic; 09-02-2017 at 01:50 AM.
Here is a snip from one tune of drums. It's all the tracks including both sets room mics as recorded so no processing except I knocked a couple of dB off the top with a limiter and I think I panned the high hat a little, otherwise straight tracks, faders at zero.
Heh heh, that sounds pretty good Karbo, actually it sounded great on my monitors.
A short geek diversion.... I had a question as to whether there had been any unexpected latency when tracking. I assumed that since I didn't do a loopback test before the session began, I could never really know.... but I can!
I have really clean tracks (no click bleed) but it dawned on me that if I took an overhead track, split out a silent section then normalized I might see evidence of the click that I don't hear, which turned out to be correct. Below is that click bleed compared with the original click source post normalization:
That delay turns out to be about 180 samples which seems bad (3-4 ms @ 48k) but it isn't bad because that is what the mic heard, *not* what the drummer heard. If we remove the time it took for that click sound to exit the headphones and hit that mic (which is 3-4 feet away from his head), we can deduce that there was no appreciable latency that didn't get accounted for.
Why did I do this? Basically, examining tracks and wanted to confirm I had not introduced latency and didn't realize it, but the above shows I didn't so that's good and a feelgood more than anything and just a sanity check before we start laying all the other tracks on top. May have more updates on the project in the next few days/week, tracking bass at the moment.
__________________ Music is what feelings sound like.
Last edited by karbomusic; 09-05-2017 at 01:23 PM.
Thanks Insub! If I suddenly disappear, you'll know they didn't come out well.
Here is a snip from one tune of drums. It's all the tracks including both sets room mics as recorded so no processing except I knocked a couple of dB off the top with a limiter and I think I panned the high hat a little, otherwise straight tracks, faders at zero.
Sounding good!
I'm still wondering where my new band project is going to track drums at. I'm hoping to find a better space than our rehearsal room which is in my buddy's basement. All concrete floor and walls, about 20' x 12' x 7' tall. Plus, we're short on mics. I only have a pair of SDC left that could be used for room mics. So, unless we go to a studio we'll be making do with what we've got.
So, unless we go to a studio we'll be making do with what we've got.
I trust you. Do ^that and live it! It is truly my life story, always making do with what I have, I have more than I used to but 99% of what I do know came from recording with almost none of the conditions/gear I actually needed. If you are short on mics, and the drummer is steady dynamically, the recorderman method works really well and in smaller rooms, I used it for years, this is actually my first diversion from that method in a long time.
__________________ Music is what feelings sound like.
@Jennifer, I'm glad it turned out useful. When I first threw the chain together trying to figure something out, I had no idea it would actually work but it did, so I didn't complain.
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What it does allow is independence of source pan and reverb pan. So you can have a source on the left sending to mono reverb in the centre, a sound I really like. Now you've got me wondering about how to make it more efficient :-)
Let us know how it goes!
__________________ Music is what feelings sound like.
Project "God Candy"
I had planned to be able to track the entire band as you can see in the routing sheet, but that need didn't arise.
Oops, sorry about that. 
Everyone says we sound like every 70s rock band all at the same time but more modern. Not sure I know how to take that but I kind of liked it.
Hybrid Mode
