La Bête Blooms Drum Microphone Techniques (Toms & Overheads)

Again, referring to Tingen (2005). I decided to examine Albini'sfavourite microphone for recording toms. The microphone listed is the E22s (Josephson Engineering Inc., 2014) available at http://www.josephson.com/srs6.html . It is a side-address condenser microphone and I don't believe I have access to anything that would remotely resemble this microphone.

I decided to look into what microphone choices other producers I have mentioned use. According to Buskin (2000) Glen Kolotkin uses Sennheiser MD421s (Sennheiser, 2016) on toms, I decided to research the microphone and see if it may be a suitable substitute.

After examining both frequency response charts, the response seems to be largely similar until roughly 1.7kHz where it is quite heavily pronounced on the MD421. I feel that this can be corrected with an EQ by cutting problem frequencies due to the limited options available to me.

Steve Albini states one of his favourite choices overhead microphones are the Coles 4038s (Coles Electroacoustics, 2015). I have access to one Coles, so it wont be possible to use this microphone for an overhead as I would need a pair.

I again re-visited the article regarding Glen Kolotkin (Buskin, 2000). He used a pair of AKG C414s (AKG, 2016) to record overheads. I also examined the frequency responses of these microphones against one another. I found that they were both quite similar, however the Coles roles off around 6kHz. This could be replicated by rolling off the high end slightly using an EQ to try and re-create the sound a pair of Coles microphones may offer.





   

La Bête Blooms Drums and Bass Recording Approach

My practices carried out whilst recording La Bête Blooms will be informed by the practices of both Steve Albini, and Butch Vig.

Both engineers prefer to take a live approach to recording, However I feel that it would be quite difficult to minimise bleed/spill from individual microphones given the size of the college studio. 

In the aforementioned article regarding Steve Albini, he states; 

I prefer to record as much of the band in one live take as possible. If you do it any other way, the band is forced into an unnatural situation from the very beginning of the process. They play together in the rehearsal room and on stage, so it seems normal to me that they also play together when they come into the studio. With 90 percent of the records I do, the singing is recorded after the band, unless the singing is what leads the band (Tingen, 2005) 

Taking this into consideration, I have decided to take a live approach when recording bass and drums, recording both together to a click track with the drummer in the live room, and the bass player in the control room running through a Sansamp straight into the desk as a ghost track. The remaining elements such as the bass, guitar and vocals will be overdubbed using a multi-track approach to achieve more flexibility with the overall sound.