I had fun playing with the position of my mono room mic. For this one I ended up trying it low to the ground between the kick and snare, pointing up at the snare wires. I adjusted the snare wires to give a little natural decay. No reverb on the kit. I may have gone too heavy on the kick, and will probably back it off a bit. I recorded the guitars and bass first (to a metronome). Adding drums later is always less desirable for me because I feel like I end up with more timing issues, but it’s not too bad.
I wrote the tune with my electric while it was unplugged and liked the clicky string noise, so I mic’d that and blended it in subtly. Added a little definition.
I also tried a multi band compressor on the lower frequencies of the bass to keep the volume very consistent.
Always fun to play with different techniques. Thanks for any comments/feedback. I hope you enjoy my little basement studio instrumental!
Good tune @flyguitarfish , simple and straight ahead (which doesn’t mean easy to do) and I think the sound is great. Not easy to do either. I can hear things to extend it out but it’s complete as is.
Very full and punchy drum sound - nice and natural, too. I think you’re right about the kick - it could come down in level a bit - it would probably groove a little better with the bass that way.
Thanks for the feedback! A little at a time. I just sold my 12 year old G1 KRK Rokit 5’s and picked up a pair of Neumann KH 120s. They are very revealing. Not as boomy as the KRKs, definitely tighter. Switches on the back help to cut some frequencies to compensate for my less than perfect room, and it has really cleaned up the sound.
Hopefully my mixing and mastering improves, and there are fewer surprises when I sound test in my truck and other speakers. And this will make it more fun to listen to what everyone else is making too!
Excellent stuff. Great guitar and bass tones and the kit sounds really tight all round. I especially like the hats, definitely one of the trickier elements to capture but you’ve got them sounding like a million bucks.
Very nice feel. You know Tom Lord-Alge said in a video that he doesn’t believe in and understand why some songs have a lot of deep rich reverb on the guitar and the drums and bass, ect are very little or none His point I think was something like it is off balance to have only one instrument with a lot of reverb and others that don’t in a way that it’s off balance in some way. I get what he is saying but the issue with that is that there are verb pedals, and the piano has a pedal built in to give it some verb sound ish. So I think a crisp non verb kit works and I think it gives it a fresh and more interesting sound as it can be not what we expect. I like this song and I played it a few times while eating dinner. Great work.
@flyguitarfish Love it! This would be an awesome backing track for any number of things. Love the groove and the whole thing holds my interest musically. I could hear another lead guitar playing over the top of it, but it actually works great without it too!