Day 12 - Drum Effects

Had a great night, good sleep and got up rested. Enjoyed a nice time of worship from Jesus Culture, watched a good sermon by Kim Walker on Youtube and chatted with Jessica via Skype. Totally enjoyed the warmth of the sun while sitting outside at the pool for a short moment. It must have been 23 degrees Celsius, and it was only 11am. I love it. Back at home Jessica (my wife) is in wintertime with freezing cold, snowy weather. I know it’s unfair, but still I enjoyed the sun for a moment. But as there is a lot of work to do, I dove right back into some last edit work and worked the rest of the morning on the text for the artwork, bio, website etc. Rich came in around noon and started that what we call effects day. The first day of choosing all the effects we are going to use on the album. All the tracks have been edited, processed and brought in balance with each other. Now it is time to play around with some effects.
I told you earlier that we want to mix this album as analog as possible, to get that nice, warm, full & rich sound. Today we was the day to lay down the drum effects. Instead of using a digital reverb or a reverb plugin we will use a super analog, natural reverb.
The main recording room of The Mouse House is well known for the awesome drum sound that can be achieved there. The room has a great natural reverb, and is very well balanced over the whole frequency spectrum. So we have set up a PA system that is playing my drum tracks at loud volume in the big main recording room. With 4 microphones, set up at specific positions at ground level and upstairs Rich is recording the natural reverb and reflections, as if my drum kit was played in his studio. After a few initial test runs we decided that this was the way to go, and we started to dial in everything and start to track the drum reverb. This process took most of the day.
As Rich had to leave early, I got the evening to myself in the studio to finalize some of the last edits and listened through what we have until now. With those remarks tomorrow we start finalizing the mixes after we have recorded the last few drum track reverbs.
Well, it’d past midnight, so off to my bunk, but firstly turn on those important back-ups. Hope all goes well tonight.