so, here was the target:
Get the drums recorded first, with everybody playing along in headphones, and build the recordings up from there.
figured to shoot for 10 songs during the session....
7 good songs, to go on the album, out of 10 songs recorded.
if we're on a roll, maybe we get 12 songs.
so, we set up the gear and cables on friday night...
we then used saturday, as the mix-levels and headphone-levels session....
and the actual recording session on sunday, from 12 noon til 6:30 pm.
we used an
alesis HD24 (at 24 bit and 44/1khz), and an Allen and Heath board.
the idea was, to have everyone else in the band, playing live in the same room along with the drummer,
but to have everyone (but the drummer) 'silent recording', with individual headphone mixes for everyone, via 6 auxillary sends on individual channels.
that worked really well, but took all day long saturday, to set up.... levels, mix balances, all that.
we recorded acoustic guitar direct, behind a gobo.
bass guitar direct, electric guitar via a Palmer Junction, and keys direct.
the singer was behind a plexiglass 'door' we built across an adjoining room.
this cut down on 'most' of the bleedthrough from the vox (he's really loud when he's singing).
so we started with setting the drum kit up, minus cymbals, since the drummer had a gig friday night, and had to use the cymbals with his 2nd gigging kit.
we used a matched pair of audio tecnicas for the overheads...
and a Audix kit for most of the drums- one for each tom, one large diaphram in the front of the kick, an akg on the beater side,
an audix on the top snare, and a 57 on the bottom snare....
and a 57 on the hi hats.
we had no external processing at all..
so all levels were set very carefully, with lots of headroom.
we got 14 songs in 6-1/2 hours. LOL