Recording 'The High Christ'
Blake Beesley asked if I would help out by recording his band in the studio. He said he had booked the studio out for Friday 11th November 2016 from 19:00 - 24:00 to record drums.
Friday 11th November 2016
We got into the studio for 19:00 and setup the drum kit for Blake, although as we were a group of guitarists we didn't have too much knowledge on what we were doing. Blake helped setup the kit while we setup the microphones.
We used the two AKG C414s for overheads, and used Shure SM57s for the snare and toms.
We used these microphones because the 414s have a good frequency response and give a nice 'true image' of the sound being played. The drum kit that Blake brought with him had a very nice sound in the studio and we wanted to keep that as best as possible.
The SM57 is always a good choice for snare and tom miking and close mic situations so is the default choice.
We miked the kick drum up with the AKG D112 because it is a good kick drum mic.
Blake brought with him a reference track to play to with the rest of the instruments scratched in so that saved a lot of time with timings and setup.
We ran into some problems with the backing track as it wasn't recorded to a click. Which would be okay if the timing was close, but it unfortunately wasn't. This meant that playing to the backing track was near impossible for a drummer. We then decided to see if we could fix the parts where it went out of time, but that wasn't possible either. We then resulted to trying to figure out a rough tempo and set the BPM to it in Pro Tools so that he could play to that instead. This worked for the most part but there were points where he forgot what part he was supposed to be drumming, which was not ideal.
In the end we had to call it a day and take what we had. We decided to see if we could find a time when the whole band could come in together so that they would all play in time. We decided on Thursday 1st December 2016.
We booked the studio out for 6 hours from 18:00 - 24:00 on 1st December for the whole band to come in and play. We were running close to Christmas at this point and wanted it all recorded before hand. It became a challenge considering the studio was booked out a lot at the time.
Friday 11th November 2016
We got into the studio for 18:00 and set up the drum kit, miking everything the same way we did in the previous session. We got the two guitar amps in the studio and miked them up ready for the guitarists, doing the same with the bass amp.
The band arrived at 18:30 and we discussed that the problems were. We let them rehearse and then recorded some takes.
It seemed a lot better with the whole band than when recording to the backing track until it started to slip out of time.
We deduced that eh problem was not in the drumming but instead was with the lead guitarist, as he tended to go out of time first, with everyone else following, leaving the drummer out of time to the rest and throwing them all off.
We thought we could fix this issue but simply having them play to a click in headphones, and went for another take. This still did not fix it and we had run out of time and ideas. We decided to leave it as it was as we were not getting anywhere, so let the band know what was happening and said that they are welcome to come in again and try another time if they wanted.
We did not organise another studio session and shortly after the band unfortunately split up and the project was thrown away.
The High Christ in the studio - credit: Paul Finney