Silverwing recording CD of original music

What have I been doing since I last posted?  Oh, I think that would be procrastinating.  Yep, that's it.  Because the CD has been coming along quickly and I have posted nothing.  So here we go....

After the scratch track was completed, the band members were all supposed to come back to the studio, listen to the scratch track through headphones and then play our individual part, one person at a time.  So first up is Frank the drummer.  The drum tracks will be the first layer in our final CD.

Frank has the drums all set already from playing the scratch tracks and so now we mike the drums put each mike into a different channel on the mixer/recorder.  Frank puts the headphones on and plays along with the song, while the recorder does its job.  Sounds to simply, but whoa, nothing is that simple.

Frank plays his heart out.  His time is perfect and he adds little touches to each song.  He is just great.  So he plays each song and he heads back home which is an hour away.  He probably spent an entire day working on these individual tracks for the drums.  We are very excited.

Our engineer is going to listen to the tracks and do a little clean up before we go forward with the next layer of our CD.  He is going to listen to each individual tracks and see if there is any ugly white noise or overbleed from another drum.  Theoretically each mike should only pick up the drum that it is pointed at.  But no, we didn't use the right type of drum mikes.

And so the mikes picked up the drum in front of them and then everything around them as well.  Microphones come in a variety of types, you got your vocal mikes, instrument mikes, condenser mikes, etc, etc, and we used the wrong type of mikes on the drums.  So we picked up a Drum Mike package from Shure.  The PGDMK6 Drum Mike Kit from Shure did the trick.

We had Frank return to the studio and the drum mikes were placed strategically, so each tom, snare and cymbal had a clean track recording.  The kick drum was miked and a blanket was tossed over it, so it wouldn't bleed over into the other mikes. 

Frank re-played the entire CD and, wow, what a difference good mikes can make in your recording effort.  So use the right tool for the right job.  When recording drums for a CD try the Shure Mike Kit.  It worked well for Silverwing.