Drums!

16th April 2008 saw an unusual (though not unique) event in the Darkroom calendar - a drum recording session. I'd identified a need for some proper, acoustic drums (you know, real things that a real person is beating hell out of, rather than something programmed) on the new album, so we enlisted the fine drummer that is Andrew Booker to help us out. (We've performed with Andy many times recently, both at the Improvizone gigs and the Darkroom one-off at the Green Dragon recently.)

Andy did us proud, recording some excellent grooves for about half a dozen tracks.

For the gear-heads reading: we used four mics in total. Andy's Blue Ball was in the kick drum. The snare was covered by a dynamic mic of some sort, which I think was the rehearsal room's. Probably an SM-57. We had one half of a matched pair of Rode NT5s as a close-ish overhead, somewhere over the hi-hat. For some reason we didn't use the other one of the pair. Finally we had my trusty Rode NT2-A as an other-side-of-the-room overhead-cum-everything mic. We've been able to get a very nice sound in the mix from this, somewhat random and thrown-together, selection.

os, May 2008