So this week was the first week of our recording project for my group and we began with recording the drum track. The song my group has chosen to record is Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Don’t Stop’.
My role for this week was to assist with the set up of the equipment ready for recording. We first set up the drum microphones around the drum kit (See below for microphone list) and made sure the drummer was comfortable in the drum booth. Next we set up guide musicians in the live room – A vocalist and a guitarist.
Once everything had been set up, we went into the control room to start recording. First we sent phantom power to the condenser microphones and then set the input levels of all the inputs, making sure they were balanced and had enough input gain. Then we had to prepare the drums for recording – panning the overheads to get the kick and snare central, checking the bleed from the kit on the tom mics and finally flipping the phase of the snare top. Once this had all been done we did a quick run-through checking the levels in both the headphone mixes and the levels going into ProTools, then we recorded a couple to takes of the drum track.
Microphone List and Channel Guide
Ch. 1 – Guide Vocals: sE X1
Ch. 2 – Guide Guitar: Shure SM57 (Close miking guitar amp)
Ch. 17 – Kick Drum: AKG D112
Ch. 18 – Snare Top: Shure SM57
Ch. 19 – Snare Bottom: Audix i5
Ch. 20 – Rack Tom: Audix D2
Ch. 21 – Floor Tom: Audix D2
Ch. 22 – Overhead Left: AKG 414
Ch. 23 – Overhead Right: AKG 414
Ch. 24 – Room Mic: Audix ADX51
