Thursday, December 13, 2012

Recording in the City

Last night was another City Samana rehearsal. I recorded with the M-Audio 2626. The mic setup was a pair of spaced Shure SM 58's in the room to pick up guitars, an AKG C12A as the side mic and an Oktava 012 as the mid mic in an M/S pair over the drums, and a Rode NT1A on the bass amp. The input routing changed a bit over the session.
I only brought one pair of BAE Neve 1272 preamps. I was sort of kicking myself over that decision, I may as well bring both pairs I have.
My other brilliant move was that I didn't have headphones with me. To which I say derp.
The Neve's were routed directly into the M-Audio. And I'm watching the meters and there's this very clear spike punching ever second or so into the meters. I have no idea what that's all about so I pull the Neves out for the first couple hours.
Then I had an epiphany that the Neves maybe hate to see phantom power. I was, due to the fact that I hadn't bothered to bring any XLR to 1/4" cables, running directly into the M-Audio's mic preamps. Yes, I do realize that's not best practice. So on the last thing we recorded (above) Neve's were on the "room" mics.
I do like the space on the room mics. That part is nice. Guitar amps are usually recorded with a mic shoved right up in the grill but I kind of like having a few feet on them.
One issue for me is that the drums don't really have enough isolation to make them sounds like the monsters they should sound like. We don't have any baffles or anything (of course). But I'm thinking that maybe a trio of mics for the drums is what's in order. And maybe pointing guitar amps in another direction?
And, of course, asking Dave to hit the toms harder than the cymbals... ;-)
Here I boosted the drum M/S pair leaving the room mics a bit lower but smashing the drums a tad more. This song was brought about by Dave saying "What are we going to do?" and me saying "Something funky" and him replying "Like what?"

I may have overcompensated for my percussive loudness desired by making the drums too loud in this.  They're too loud and too compressed. I fought to make them too loud and too compressed. And I won.

Recording directly to Samplitude on my old PC I reported a lot of ASIO lost buffers. Like hundreds and hundreds of instances of lost buffers. I can't hear any clicking most of the time. But this is a thing which has must needs be fixed. I have no idea.
As a musical caveat: we're making these things up as we go along. I, certainly, have no idea what we're doing before we actually do it.

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