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BioFlava 11 June 2016

Hi folks,

I'm an audio geek in my 40s. I have a bit of training and experience with recording bands, but I'm coming back to recording after a long hiatus.

Here's my situation and questions...

  • I'm in a rock trio (I play bass with a drummer and guitarist) and we want to record our band in a rented house over a long weekend. We play rock covers (Beatles, Grateful Dead, Pixies, Radiohead) and some originals. I will be engineer, tape op and musician.
  • Given this, I want to create a simple, but high fidelity setup to capture our band "live" while we bash out our set and jam.
  • I'm thinking of renting or buying a set of Earthworks omni drum mics (http://www.earthworksaudio.com/microphones/drumkit-series-2/dk25r/) instead of going the "close mic every drum" approach--and then hanging a Sennheiser e609 on the guitar amp and going direct on the bass.
  • My goal is to keep the track count reasonable (8 or less) to make recording, playback and mixing relatively easy.
  • I'm not worried about bleed--as long as the overall recording sounds phase coherent and "good" (which to me means warm and organic over isolated and pure).
  • I'm not planning to do much post-recording effects processing beyond compression and EQ.
    • Does anyone have experience with this style of recording?
      • I'm particularly interested in folks who have used a simple approach to drum micing--does the three-mic style work? Any tips?
      • Is there any benefit to placing baffles between the drum mics and the rest of the band or if I go live, just go live?
      • Or, is there a way I can place the mics so that the bleed is coherent?
      • Should I compress anything as I record?
      • Will Logic running on a fast Mac PowerBook be able to record a 1-hour set w/o drop outs?

Thanks for any thoughts here!

-Bio

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Comments

Sean G Sun, 07/03/2016 - 02:48

bouldersound, post: 439689, member: 38959 wrote: It looks like you wrote "unput all ahead Latins" or "next time don't use Latin". Right, lesson learned. I'll stick with English since it is the lingua franca.

Lol...I think it got a little lost in google translation...It was supposed to say "Are we using Latin now?...":D

Sean G Sun, 07/03/2016 - 02:48

bouldersound, post: 439689, member: 38959 wrote: It looks like you wrote "unput all ahead Latins" or "next time don't use Latin". Right, lesson learned. I'll stick with English since it is the lingua franca.

Lol...I think it got a little lost in google translation...It was supposed to say "Are we using Latin now?...":D

bouldersound Thu, 07/14/2016 - 11:26

Here's the setup for a recent demo recording session. We spent three evenings. First was just a jam/warmup night. One tune from that looks like a keeper, with vocals, bass amp and horns live in the room (and in the overheads). Second night was tracking drums/bass/guitars with horns laying scratch tracks in the control room. We got three or four from that night. Third night was starting overdubs, with at least one more session of overdubs to complete the tracking.

This is a rather dead room, intentionally. If it were live then the goboes would not help much as the sound would reflect from everywhere back to the overheads. It would be an unavoidably "live" sound. If the room sounds spectacular then that might be okay, otherwise it's a big handicap. All of this was essentially covered by dvdhawk in the first reply, but I thought it would be nice to have a real example of a one-room live setup.

[MEDIA=soundcloud]bouldersoundguy/cadillac-grip-river

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