Archive for August, 2010
Day 1 of Verdant Studio Sessions
Greetings from beautiful Athens, Vermont! We are most lucky to have found this great spot to lay down the tracks to our first studio album.
After a 9am load-in and set up, we got up and running and had our first rough run-through of American Beauty before lunch.
Below are some pictures of our setup in the studio. Each person is baffled off a bit, but not total isolation.
The drums are being sent out to four speakers. So the kick drum, snare, hi-hats, and then all the other sounds each get a speaker. We are also recording the direct line outputs of the drum sampler in case we want a blend of mic’d speaker and totally direct/dry drum sounds.
Eartha is rocking all her synths direct to the mixer and will overdub some spacey embellishments as well.
Joe is recording both direct and mic’d speaker cabinet.
Vizzie is recording direct out with his laptop samples in Ableton Live, as well as his Monotron which gets some effect in Live.
We are recording through a killer old skool Neve 70s console in to Pro Tools HD. Pete Weiss is at the faders.
DrumLab is Musical
Custom-made drum sampler software that’s tuned for live performance. Using a third-party plug-in for Max, I was able to make a feature that would play samples in whichever key is set in the menu. This allows Steve to play his melodic drum pads with confidence knowing that they will more or less be in key with what we are playing (so long as DrumLab is set to the proper key).
