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Day two of tracking.

The goal tonight was to wrap up the drum tracks and initial guitar tracks. We were able to get started fairly quickly as all the gear was pretty much set.

The damn software mixer which comes with the Tascam 1804 was completely reset somehow. All the levels I’d tweaked the previous session were gone. So I had to go through the damn process of tweaking the monitor mix again. This is even more of a pain in the ass since the monitor knobs only work when you move them past some arbitrary point.

All musicians are on drugs

We started tracking and things went fairly well most of the evening. The guys in the band of course had to stop and bust out a bong between takes. One of the many reasons I’d stopped recording years ago was stupid shit like that. What if a cop came in and busted these dudes smoking dope and I’m there?

Ghost in the machine

Tracking was going fairly well until around the last of three songs we laid down. Then in the middle of what ended up being a bad take anyway, my external hard drive vanished. The MacBook firewire port goes out to the Tascam I/O, then through that unit to the external firewire drive. I ended up having to power all the units down and back up to get the drive to reappear. This happened a total of three times.

I’m a bit concerned about the drive disappearing. I suspect it’s just a bug between the Tascam, windows, the MacBook running windows etc… If this fucker goes down now we’ll lose all we’ve tracked. So the first thing on the list at the next session is to backup the data. I didn’t have time to do it tonight but the drive is powered down and not being used unti the next session.

Assuming the drive and data is ok, next session we’ll start working on bass tracks.

Tonight I finished off the last of the setup. Mainly a few missing cables, headphones and one last mic on the drums which I didn’t have with me a few days ago.

Giant drum kit

The drummer had a set of mics for his (ridiculously huge) kit. There were some nice mics there which I used, but some I didn’t. He had these little Sennheisers on the toms and I don’t really like the sound of them. They’re kind of boxy sounding. So I switched those out for my EV 408’s and 468’s which I really like for toms. I also used a couple of my mics on the snare. His snare was very poppy and not to “snarey” so I mic’d it from the bottom as well with an SM57 to get more…

This dude’s kit is so giant that I had a hard time getting mic coverage on the damn cymbals. He’s got five chinas on the kit and a zillion others, including two sets of hats. I think perhaps his lack of confidence in his playing is being mentally balanced out by his equipment.

4 marshalls

The guitar player is a pretty cool guy. He’s got FOUR Marshall cabinets with FOUR 12″ speakers in each. That’s a big enough rig for even the biggest of venues. We’re micing the whole frigging rig to get his “wall o’ guitar” sound. I must admit, it is pretty damn powerful despite how insane it is to have a rig that big.

Not the most user friendly rig

The new system I’m using is a pain in the ass. The Tascam firewire 1804 unit has direct monitoring so there’s no delay in the audio. The accompanying software mixer is really lame. It only has volumes and pans. The other stupid thing is the knobs don’t really seem to work in the mixer unless you move them all the way past some arbitrary point. Then it seems to “kick in” and they work. Not really sure what that’s all about. It’s also lame because if I want to EQ or add effects while they are playing I can’t. The output of the mixer is also somewhat gutless so I can’t really crank that part up or it distorts easily.

I had some signal routing problems at first which I figured out. There are so many ways you can route the signals into cubase and then I renamed the inputs which screwed me up. I then ran into difficulty trying to tell cubase where to store the new audio files for a new track. My buddy who is a cubase expert told me how to do it, by setting up a template. I needed to get the tracks recording to an external hard drive rather than the internal on my macbook. Once I got that figured out we were ready to track.

This band rehearses through a PA with over 20,000 watts and a zillion speakers. They’re used to rumbling the earth when they play. It was tough to talk the drummer down off the ledge since he didn’t think his kick drums were being recorded. It was basically since he couldn’t feel them and I tried my best to explain to him that a 1/2″ headphone speaker couldn’t compete with 20,000 watts of PA and 300 square feet of speaker surface…

We managed to get one tune’s drums, guitar and dummy bass down before calling it an evening. We couldn’t keep the bass because his tune was all over the place. It’s cold as hell here and their practice space temps were all over the map.

Day 3 in two days.

You know how hard it is to find a certain cable, adapter, pair of headphones, amp, speaker, mic clip bla bla bla… when your gear has been in a storage unit for 3.5 years? Hard. Add to that the fact that it’s zero friggin’ degrees here and I’m not kidding. It really is zero.

I ended up finding bin after bin of cable. Thousands of feet, tens of thousands of dollars worth of cable just sitting there in plastic bins. Rather than dig through them I just brought the damn bins to the gig in my van. Then I could search for just what I needed.

I was able to get setup fairly well, only had to make one cable for a set of cans.

I got cubase sx 2 on my MacBook working and managed to get levels through a Tascam FW1804 and Behringer adat mic pre box.

The setup will have about 12 channels of drum mics, plus a dummy bass track and initial guitar tracks. That’s what tracking will be on Tuesday, if the gear works.

One of my clients, a death metal band, has lured me out of my 3.5 year retirement as a recording sound engineer.  I start the new EP with them this month and should have some interesting blog posts coming.  I’ll be remotely recording with my macbook, cubase and a firewire I/O at their practice facility.  And when I say “facility” I really mean it.

More to come