Thought for the future

With luck and a fair wind, soon Steve and Julie will own the Barnstone Country Club before too long. Hopefully we may then have better facilities than our little scout hut which is basically a glorified shed. In the meantime though we are overjoyed to haver this opportunity and its all coming along very nicely thank you ...

Single Recording

On Friday we started recoding for what we intend to be our first single, How Come I'm Never Around. Getting a bit more comfortable now with how everything works and the setting up. Went with the same mic procedure as before, and this time had a bit longer to tweak and mix, and the drums sound awesome! The Pro44 boundary mic inside the kick is just so good, because of it being a boundary mic it really doesn't matter where you put it, I just chuck it in the drum and off we go! It does help that drew's kit is really, really good...

Had a late night doing the drum edits and I am really blown away by how good its sounding!

Result!

From the last recordings ... much better! The drums sound worlds ahead of what we did before, the Pro44 is just the most awesome mic to record the kick drum with. Using a condenser on the front skin provided nothing useful whatsoever and I'll return to my previous thoughts that the best mic for the snare is a 57.
With the absence of ProTools we now had to Di the bass better and recorded Graham's guitar with a Behringer V-Amp, both of which were marked improvements.

Second Start

Last night we reocorded 3 new songs; Tempting Fate, Bring It On and new one Crazy

Did things differently this time. Firstly and most importantly, we have switched to Logic from ProTools. This means I now carry a MacBook Pro with logic Studio 8 on it, and a little rack with the 2 Presonus Digimax mic pre's and my RME Fireface 400. Much better. I have been a dedicated Protools user for about 5 year, but Logic 8 is simply better in all regards, I'm afraid. it certainly sounds better.

I also changed the mics based on the test session we did last week. The overheads are now a coincident pair, the toms are all mic'd with the C418s and the snare now has a 57 on it. I am experimenting with using an Audio Technica boundary mic inside the kick and the C1000 condenser on the front skin

The Protools rig is going on eBay and the money can buy a new audio interface so I don't have to cart mine around. The Fireface is great as it has a zero latency mixer built in for doing the headphone feeds, but I think it'll be a Presonus Firestudio so it'll all match and it has more headphone amps and a talkback mic. Still has the zero latency mixer though.

A massive thank you to HHB / Source distribution!

Big thumbs up, pats on backs and grateful handshakes to Howard Jones, Tony Musgrove and Caroline Cook at Source Distribution for supplying us with a Presonus Firestudio. As I have said at the beginning of this blog, we are undertaking all the recordings on our own extremely minimal budget, so their help was greatly appreciated.

Selling the old and very cumbersome ProTools system has proven to be the right thing to do. All the recordings are now being done in Logic 8, and the Presonus system (a Firestudio and a pair of 8 channel Digimax mic preamps) gives as the facilities to do up to 24 tracks of simultaneous recording, and the gear compliment is now merely a MacBook Pro laptop and a little 3u rack! Much better than the 12U rack with a full computer we lugged before. It seems the dream has almost been reached - you really can carry a 24 track recording studio in a bag and little rack ... Never thought I'd see the day ...

The Presonus stuff is really really good. The preamps are all excellent, which is the main thing when you're tracking a drumkit, but importantly it also gives us 3 headphone amps with separate mixes available on each. Drivers seem fine although at the moment there are no Leopard (OSX 10.5) drivers which is rather frustrating because I had to create another boot drive for the macbook, but its all good.

Peace, and have a safe journey home.

Presonus

We have taken the plunge and have switched to a Presonus / Logic Pro setup for the recordings. I'd like to take this opportunity to say a Big Thank You to Source Distribution/HHB for responding to my grovelling and giving me a super special magic deal on a Presonus Firestudio 2626 and monitor remote. I look forward to getting that all up and running for next weeks session. Thank you! We now have the facilities to do 24 tracks at once.

In related news, I found a buyer for the old mac. Good times.

Re-assessment ...

Having listened to the recordings, a few thing become very obvious...
Firstly, the drum mic'ing was not great. Next time I'll use a dynamic on the hat, set the overheads as a coincident pair, ditch the ride mic and use a 257 on the snare. No need for an undersnare mic, its a waste of time.

More importantly, have decided to ditch the whole ProTools rig. It was a fun experiment, but it has proved far too heavy and cumbersome, when I can do it all in Logic on my macbook and fit the rest of the kit into a 4U rack, rather than a 12U rack that weighs 45KG! I'll give it a try next week with my RME Fireface.

First Recordings 2

Interesting experience last night. We recorded demos of 2 songs, All Or Nothing and Soul. The drums were done with the AKG drum kit set (d112 on the bass drum, 3 x C418s on the 3 main toms, 1 c 418 on the snare, C 1000s on the hihat. SM57 under the snare and sm58 on the ride. Little Beyer Opus 53s as overheads.
Guitar and bass tracked into ProTools with Amp Farm. Chris sang guide vocal so it was pretty much live, but it was really only the drums that we concentrated on. Proel headphone amp was shockingly shit. Poor Steve could hear nothing but distortion. Will definitely need a new one!

First Test Recordings

Tonight we're going to do the first test recordings. See how it all goes and all that. Everything is now rackmounted, cabled and ready to go!

Size doesn't matter ..

One can get silly with hard drive storage these days. My last archive drive was 500GB and cost about £90, but the audio drive in this computer is a whopping 80GB. Sound ridiculous? Not really - a 5 minute song of 24 tracks only takes up 1.2GB tops. More importantly, having a smaller drive FORCES you to backup the drive after every session, which means there will always be a copy taken away in case the unthinkable happens.

I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle ...

Of course I don't. But here it is, done ...

Building the perfect beast ...

Hands and knees again, trying to remember what order all the cards go in ....

Quicksilver G4

The arrival of the G4 ...

Build it, and they will come

I have something of a luxury; with my job I have access to all sorts of abandoned tat. In my studio at home I have an aging ProTools 24 system which I bought at auction from a studio that went bust, as well as modern ProTools LE system. The idea is to use the ProTools 24 system for tracking as it has more channels available, and then mix it on the LE system. The old system is so short on power for mixing its virtually useless but it IS mega stable for tracking.
So this weekend I started building the system. I managed to get hold of a G4 933 with 1GB ram for the princely sum of £86. I have fitted it with a Marathon rackmount kit. Took a bit of persuasion, but it is now happily running OS 10.3.4 and ProTools TDM 6.4, with a ProTools d24 and a DSP farm card in it. There is 24 bit ADAT bridge on there, and a single 888/24. One channel of the ADAT bridge is connected to an 8 channel mic pre unit, and I'm trying to track down another for the other ADAT port - all together that will give us 24 channels of input, 16 with mic preamps. We'll be recording at 44.1kHz /24 Bit as there will be fewer artifacts when converting to CD than 48k, and the system has been happily tested recording 24 tracks for an hour.

Its strange to think that this system, built from bits that were destined for the bin, would have cost over £10,000 about 5 years ago. Old technology, yes, but its reliable. And most importantly, ProTools IS the industry standard, and if we need to go to a studio for any reason, we can take our sessions and just carry on working. But for the moment, we can record at our own pace, and then I can take the sessions home to edit and mix ....

Turning Point

So fast forward a year. Skeleton Crew have been gigging for 11 months and getting great responses. As well as the demos that are on the myspace page, we have released a live E.P., recorded at the Intake Club in Mansfield. Its a good representation of what the band sounds like, but the time has come to make a new recording, and so that is where this story starts...

Rather than spending on recording studio fees, and because the first recordings came out so well, we decided to do the recordings ourselves. The reason? Simple. Studios can have great gear and and good rooms, but you're paying by the hour, and therefore lack the luxury of time to get things right from the start and have a relaxed a natural attitude to the music. So we're putting the gear together ourselves, to take as long as we need to get the songs right. I'm really looking forward to it as I have never recorded, edited and mixed a full album myself; it'll be a good test of all the skills I have tried to learn over the last few years.

As well as the dozen or so songs that make up the Skeleton Crew live set, the last few weeks have been busy writing times. Songs have been written and emailed back and forth - about half a dozen, with many more on the way. We have already started rehearsing the first now that we have brief gig break. And I have started to assemble our recording system for the project...

In the beginning ....

God created the world. And it was good. Then a bunch of other stuff happened. Then Skeleton Crew created music. And it was not so good, but rapidly got better. And then it was decided to record some of the noise that they made.
So this blog is basically a blow by blow coverage of the recording of the first Skeleton Crew recording. That is to say, the third - the first venture was 5 songs, which was whittled to 4, that became the first demo. Graham and I did the guitars, Steve the bass and Chris the vocals, and between us myself, Graham and Stu programmed all the drums. We did it all in Logic, and the rest was recorded at our regular rehearsal room in the Scout Hut in Langar. I rushed the mixes together to give to Drew when he joined the band, but they turned out well enough to grace the myspace page for long enough, and even become favourites ....