It's a mixture. I truly have wayyy too much gear, but I have offloaded a good chunk of the electrics to buy bluegrass stuffs.

I need to check out that Recto. Pretty sad I don't have the funds for it at the moment.

I don't care what anyone says, I like Recs, always have. Even if I can't get Red/Modern to work for me worth a damn. There's a lot of snouds in that bocks. Orange/Vintage is where it's at for me, with the treble down, presence up, mids up and bass to taste. I'm also a fan of the treble completely off trick on those amps- works on the Stilettos, too. Doesn't give you a ton of wiggle room, but it does Do A Thing re: changing the voicing, though then you're dialing in top with the presence control. An odd tone stack for sure.

Recs are finicky amps; I've heard amazing sounding ones and I've heard ones that sounded like hammered asswhole. I think they deserve much better than their stereotypical rep as a "metal amp".

I've also wanted to hear one through Greenbacks IRL and am dissapointed I didn't when I had the opportunity.

On a non-amp related note, so I returned home yesterday and my upstairs neighbors were still there. Now, they were supposed to move out on the 15th. Then they were supposed to move out on the 20th, apparently, and now it's the end of the month. I heard from my roommate that our landlady, who is the nicest, sweetest woman you could meet, was hella pissed. Like, we have never seen this woman moderately irked, let alone hella pissed. Mostly because Upstairs d00d's wife is "totally batshit" and the only reason she doesn't throw them out is 'cause she's afraid she'll fuck up the place. Of course she is apparently going to evict them if they're not gone by then as she's up to here, wherever here is, with that woman.

On the plus side, our friend Ms. Anastasia will be moving in with us, and our rent + bills will be cheaper, as she likes us, and we'll have two floors besides.

The downside, of course, is that I owe a lot of money from when Ms. Jen was out of the country for the bills. Itemized, of course, and all detailed, but it's all in her name so she paid it all from España.

Yeah there is a 2ch Rec in ... not pretty ... condition at a local shop for "around $600" that I really want to fucking buy.

$600 for a 2-channel? I don't care if the thing was hit by a train or a ship, assuming it's in functional shape inside.

Talk them into $600 out the door, including tax, and you have yourself quite the score there if there's nothing actually wrong with it.

The rectos I've heard lately at the Rehearsal Factory have been quite good.

Yeah but the wife would murder me.

And not like in the joking husband she will get mad sense, but in the bloody murder with a knife sense. Unless I can manage to sell $600 worth a gear soon. I might let the vox loose which would cover maybe half the bill.

I just did my first true and proper test of the Tascam trying to bring in its analog max of 14 inputs.

And it looks like it works? I was running into some issues with fewer channels before, but i think it may perhaps have been a driver conflict with a camera after all? But i just trecorded like 38 minutes of 14 mics on drums, and i can't hear anything fucked up other than the drumming itself.

I do have it set to maximum latency also now. But really, i am most concerned with initial tracking anyhow, rather than overdubs. Wost case scenario, i can overdub over firewire with the old setup.

But it looks like it will go. It will get a real test in early august though when i try to record a friend's band.

ohhh, sounds like a go. Nice.

How'd you manage the preamp situation and what mics did you throw up, good sir? I'm curious! Obviously some things had to go into the line ins... Granted with a drum kit that's sorta a non-issue re: levels. That seems like a useful device, that Tascam job. I'm rather partial to their stuff; they make functional tools that seem to work well and are inexpensive.

I may have snagged a gig recording a DM rekkid. I can do some metal. d00d at the guitar store near my house. May pay a bit, too, somewhere between 5 bills and 1k depending. I could use that fer sure. I even tossed out the idea of doing it to tape- he likes old-school stuff- but we concluded that was impractical.

Also, me band got a half-page writeup in the local rag, which ain't bad:

Yarr, the jibjab has 8 XLR, 2 guit/line with level controls, and then four standard line-ins in two pairs. Even recording drums, the level on the line-in mics is low, a bit lower than the Alesis was, with the Alesis being a mixer and having level controls for the two line-in pairs. But i am not really all that concerned with signal-to-noise, particularly as you say, with the source being drums(and i have never been too concerned with impedance problems with mics anyhow ). At some point i will run some more tests on quieter things though and see if i still feel that the signals come in decently enough.

As for mics, fourteen inputs pushes my meager collection to its limit. It also pushes my brain to its limit, because really, i don't honestly believe that i need that many on a drum kit.

But anyhow, i went:

2xMXL990 - Glyn Johns overheads
1xKBM412 kickfront
1xMXL2001 two rooms away, shitslammed.
1xBG2.0 snare top
2xTSM411 rack toms
1xPG58 floor tom
1xPG58 hi-hat
1xPG58 oddly placed room mic(sort of on a shelf chest high, not really facing the drums)
1xPZM undersnare/kickbeater/everything(just lying on the floor under the snare and in front of the kick beater head)
1xtelephone kind of a room mic
1xTSM411 random room mic2(lying on the floor facing sort of towards the floortom side of the kit
1xrandom omni behind me(mostly just to fill the 14th slot with anything - it is actually a PC-style simple electret, and doesn't actually work correctly into a line in or preamp, but does produce a solid wall of noise that i can use to make sure i am not getting drop-outs or spikes)

Was way too many actually, especially in my small space.

In the end i wound up muting:

The snare top(too poingy)
The telephone(too mid-aggressive distorted to be useful in the mic mix)
The random floor TSM411(just redundant in addition to being out of phase)
The random ill-suited omni (literally just a wall of grey noise once normalized)

Then i took the two-rooms-off 2001 and the random chest-high PG58, and shitslammed both with limiters and then split them hard left and right for kind of an odd mismatch of room ambiences in a stereo spread. I actually kind of like the sound of this, i am not going to lie. Especially with the weird mismatch in low end between them(the two-rooms-off MXL is bringing in an awful lot of low end reso, maybe from the walls? I actually had to EQcut it a little for bring the lowmud down a little)

I probably wouldn't ever record anyone else this way, but really it was more just a test to see if the system i have in place will actually track fourteen at once if/when needed for full bands. And it sure looks like it will.




Awsum.



Super Duper Awsum.

That's a nice write up there Snaxie.

Chris that is a shit load of mic usage there. A nice test of the gear, eh?

I am back up in Boston tomorrow night for teh gigs...

Bought a 1980 Silverface Twin Reverb at the store today.

I fucking want it. Almost had a Jcm800 2204 but it had a shatty MV pot, so I told the guy to fix it and bring it back. Cause I fucking want it.

That would be a nice rig right there, with an A/B switch. A Twin and a 2204? Balls-out loud, but no one could eff with that toan.

Well, maybe Chris from my band. He doesn't like 800s. Says they're the worst sounding popular amp or something of that nature. He finds them bright, thin and harsh. He dislikes most Marshalls, Rectos, and most things that say Peavey on them. I liked the 2204 I had, but it was a '76 JMP. Essentially the same animal though.

As someone who's used a hella lot of mics on a drum kit, nope. Honestly, four is cool. Six is better if only to beef up the body and sustain of the toms- hard to do when the only things picking them up are so far away- the overheads, picking up the entire kit. And I do like a room mic, so call it seven and I'd be happy with that.

The spot mics and all that shit are fun, but they're not really necessary. Dependent on context they can be useful- I know for the Garda stuff I've really liked having hat and ride mics because of how the drummer plays, and it brings out some detail in the context of a dense mix. All the room stuff is basically an experiment, whether it works on that song or not. I like the smash-and-trash kinda mics sometimes, again depending.

The tom mics, really, as far as I'm concerned, are just there to give some weight to the tom hits, which might sound awesome in the overheads with the kit soloed, but you just don't get that size from the toms with the mics being several feet off the source in the context of the mix. Not that I've found, anyhow. I tend to edit/gate them pretty fierce.

I'm reminded I'd like to experiment with a binaural head on the drum kit- or, rather in front of the kit where I feel it sounds best. Effin' that and a kick and snare mic and call it a day. I really wish I got to record drums more often- yes, they're a challenge, but damn it's fun seeing what you can make them do. Oddly I've never felt I've really captured what they sound like in the room, and want to. Guitar amps yes, drums no. Never got it. Cool, but not accurate as such.

My drum mixes have been kind of the opposite of that. Close mics are king. The overheads just provide the glue and context for the close mics, representing whatever doesn't have its own mic pointed at it. Overheads and bad sounding room are low enough that without the close mics anything but the cymbals would just be a whisper. I guess this makes sense, considering the bashing fashion that the cymbals are being played, and the sheer wall of noise the drums have to contend with in the mix.

I heard some samples of toms miced from both sides and actually, yeah, it sounds pretty good. I don't have enough channels for that kind of nonsense though.

If anyone wants to mess around with my sounds and demonstrate to me that I'm doing it wrong I posted the stems to a short track in the Human Compost thread in Your Recordings.

Granted, I'm generally recording disco beats and you're recording blast beats, so the context is a little different.

I've wanted to try the two mics on the toms thing but never have. Easier with a four-piece I guess if only 'cause there's a smaller channel count and less mics needed. I suspect I'd like it given how I tend to treat (Read: abuse) tom mics. I'll beat on them with a mastering limiter or distort them to all hell. Somehow that actually sounds good in the mix with the attack/top end coming from the OHs, even though it sounds bizarre or just plain bad soloed. It's rather staggering the amount of distortion one can add to a drum kit and still make it work.

I've really liked the side-shell mic on the snare and I'd be curious about trying it on the toms as well, which I don't think I've ever seen done. Hearing a really nice drum kit in a room and then hearing it not captured on a recording is vexing. All the resonance and power of the thing, I want to hear that, like how it actually sounds sitting a few feet away. Add close mics to taste for impact. In part, why I like the L/C/R thing- I want space for the space to sit in.

Re: bandstuff, Mr. Chris may be picking up a Roland Fantom next week, as both Kurzweils are like 20 years old and not reliable. If we tried to make one working synth out of two, that's probably a sign to snag something else.

Just got EZ Drummer installed again. I sense an olde-time drum jam coming up soon

I think I might be down for that. Been a while...