http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/GARDA_DRUMS.zip

Don't mind the dodgy edits. They're not so dodgy you'd hear them if you wanted to make a jam track out of this. Random bits of Garda's Confabulated Edison. About 2 minutes of wide-open Bonham-style stomp. 78 BPM. I cut stuff up, stuck it together for ye, bounced it down to 24/44.1 as the original 4-and-change @ 88.2 would have been a truly monstrous download. Even cut down and downsampled they're almost 300 meg. So imagine the track twice as long and the files 4x as big.

Thank you Mr. tor for the FTP space! Even if my wireless did crap out and I threw them up on Dropbox for now.

21 tracks through an SSL 4040G. API and Neve pres. Everything labeled re: mics and placement. Going from memory on the comps and pres; I don't remember all of them, or even most. Drums are Rändy's Pearl custom shops with the 24" kick, mondo-deep snare and Zildjian A & A Custom cymbals. I think he actually uses a felt beater on the kick. Oh, and a LP stand-mounted tambourine. No processing save for what was printed "to tape" during tracking, unless my sketchy-quick editing artifacts count.

Kick in: AKG D112/Distressor/API 312
Kick out: AKG D12E
Kick sub: Yamaha NS10 woofer
Snare top: Shure SM57/Distressor/API 312
Snare bottom: Sennheiser MD441
Toms: Sennheiser MD421s
Main Overheads: Telefunken M16 Mk IIs/API 312s
Center OH: Neumann KM184 SDC
Over Snare: Neumann M149 LDC killed Phil Collins-style with a dirty comp- old RCA broadcast limiter?
Hats- Neumann KM184
Ride- AKG 451 SDC
Tambourine- Shure SM7
Close rooms: Coles 4038 ribbons
Far rooms: Neumann KM184s
Ceilings: Sennheiser MKH40 SDCs
Green Bullet: Shure Green bullet, beat to shit with an old broadcast limiter. Collings, IIRC?

They were recorded in this room:


Play with them, cut them up, jam over them, ask questions and I might even remember the answers, have them written down somewhere or ask someone who'd know. Usually stuff for download is either processed stems from a commercial release or someone's homebrew tracks. This is something in-between, cut up shit from a yet-unreleased indie record of naked tracks done at a commercial facility. Take it for what it's worth and enjoy.

Massive. I will DL it now and czech it in the tomorrowtimes.

Spiffy. Let me know if there's anything wrong with them besides my editing hackjob to smallerize them and see what worked and if there's something fucked-up I'll try and fix it and re-up them after rehearsal tomorrow.

This is a proper fucktonne of microphones. I had to color code them just to make sense of what was what.

Now that you have gotten a chance to play a little with them, how much of what are you using when you mix?

This was an odd case where I used the icons palette in Logic myself. They're a bit GarageBand-y but I don't like looking at multicolored tracks for some reason?



I used the elephant for the Green Bullet; it made sense somehow.

I just got around to making sense of the four thousand takes of guitars on this yesterday and haven't even begun mixing anything for real yet. Overall I'm really enamored of the room sounds though.

Oh, and a few observations: I like the spot mics on the hats, ride and tambourine. I like having the hats close to centered and the tambourine far left (I pan drummer's perspective roughly 200% of the time). I've been panning everything L/C/R for a while now (save for stuff that pans across the stereo field) But I can't bring myself to do it with drums. Yet. Maybe I should.

The crushed distorted mics are also pretty sweet, and the sub track on the kick should be interesting to toy with. I might try some weird comp/gate or expand/transient shaper thing on it to make it a focused blast of low end.