D8 Skills #131 & D9 & D10 | Unit E | Andy Ford | Session #13

Today, Andy and I recorded his drums for 'I'd Give You The World, But You'd Still Deserve More.' I arrived at 11:00 and started setting up all the recording gear.

The first thing I did was create and input list, position the drum kit in the centre of the room, and move everything unnecessary out of the way into the drum booth.

I first chose the best stands for each purpose and set them up in their right places:

I then clipped in all the microphones and put XLR cables at the base of each mic stand:

Lastly, I connected all the XLRs to the wall box following the input list from top to bottom:

After the setup was complete, I set up the mixing desk and Pro Tools session.

I put into practice something I learned from my research. I taped together a pencil condeser and Shure SM57 for the hi-hat, and pointed them outwards from the centre of the kit to isolate the hi-hat better because of the cardioid polar patterns of the microphones:

This was the most amount of microphones I've ever used on a drum kit (13). I chose to experiment and therefore improve my skills in this area. I'll critically listen to my recording in the mix, and will be much more confident about recording a drum kit in the future.

We then went about recording loads of takes until Andy was happy with what we've got. I took notes of what these good takes were throughout to make it easier for me when comping in post as I discussed here.

I posted the above video on my Instagram story as promotion of my services.

I spoke to the session drummer for 'Ground Floor (again)' about leaving the above setup set up to record the drums tomorrow as he said he'd be able to do it on Thu or Fri this week, but he's cancelled again due to not being ready... he had problems with his car back from somewhere he was staying. I asked him whether he could send me the GarageBand project file that he wrote the drums on since it's easy to add it to a Logic Pro project and would be useful to have a mix ready for the Unit D hand in, however, he said he doesn't want to because it's not my drum part and I could change it. I find this very strange because I'm the producer of the song.

We finished just before 16:00, left the equipment set up to pack up tomorrow morning and had to leave. I went to Hot Radio, signed up to an event this Sunday, and spoke with Jay Rachet who was on air at the time.

When I got home, referencing the notes I made at the bottom of the input list, I copied over what we'd previously decided were the best takes from my memory stick, and imported them into the Logic Pro project.