We needed to do the drums for 2 songs tonight; Change To Survive was the song that Jarrod had sent down recently with the wrong tempo. That has since been fixed. The other song was the re-recording of the drums for Getting Out.
We set the drums up virtually identical to last time with the kick drum facing the door of the studio. Usual M88 on the kick, SM57 and KM184 on the snare top, MD421’s on the toms, KM184 on the hat, and AKG414 on the overheads. I am really starting to like the near-coincident pair for stereo miking. It gives me a nice wide image when the mikes have got a lot of ground to cover – like from one end of a drum kit to another. For room mikes, we used the usual U87 – one placed in the same room as the kit, and the other placed in the smaller drum room.
Dave was of course in fine form and quickly got down a number of takes for Getting Out. Done.
For Change To Survive the instruction from Jarrod was the word “minimal”. Basically no hi-hat. I’m always ok to do things like that, but we thought we should also nail a safe copy first. So Dave played a few takes with hi-hat and a part that would be typical of what any drummer would play. Sounded great. Once that was done, we thought we’d go for a take as per Jarrod’s request, but Dave had other (and ultimately better) ideas.
He placed a cardigan over the 2nd and 3rd toms, and replaced the hi-hat with a
tambourine. I liked where this was going. He then played replaced one of his sticks with a maraca and proceeded to play this dark, brooding rhythm that perfectly suited
the song. The cardigan effectively deadened the sound of the toms and Dave’s rhythm was centred around the 3rd tom and
being struck by the maraca. It sounded so good. I added a further refinement by suggesting he remove the snares from his snare drum and play slightly more on the tambourine. In the end, I was pretty confident that we would only need one take, but we laid down 2 takes just to make sure.
Once we had the basic drum part done, we overdubbed the cymbal crashes. I knew
this was something Dave had wanted to do on previous recording sessions, but apparently had never been given the opportunity to try. Well, we were all in a pretty
experimental mood, so we had a go. I was after a big crash, almost gong-like sound.
So Dave got out his largest cymbals and we turned them upside down. We auditioned a couple of sounds, and settled on the
cymbals of choice. We went through the track once only using the overhead and room mikes for the recording. This was recorded all again on a different take of Pro Tools for later comping.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Dave is such a joy to work with. I love his experimental approach and his professionalism in the studio. He’s always open to new ideas and then coming back again with his own ones. Tonight proved that Dave is so suited to this project. Combine this with Antonia and Cameron and we have an awesomely creative team. There is really a good sense of teamwork here. We all know what needs to be done, and there is never any mucking around. We just get on with it. The vibe is fantastic and one that I have not known for many years.
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