It’s awesome getting bands in here to record their full length albums, so we were really psyched to get New York City band Heartbreak Renaissance in to work on their upcoming full length debut album. Heartbreak Renaissance is actually fronted by our very own music producer Roman Molino Dunn, and it is his Emo/Pop-punk project. He’s pretty determined to make sure “emo” isn’t a dirty word anymore, pop-punk for that matter too. And, we know as an NYC recording studio that there really isn’t enough good pop-punk or emo coming out of New York City, that needs to change!
Heartbreak Renaissance has taken about a year to get this album fully tracked, and mixed, and Roman isn’t taking any shortcuts with this one. We’ve spent countless hours with him recording guitars, bass, vocals, and now drums. They’ve spent the last year laying down the guitars, bass, and vocals and getting them perfect before bringing in their drummer to really slam it home. It was a really cool approach since in most albums the drums are one of the first things we do. But doing it this way brought a totally new perspective to it, and gave the drummer such a pivotal role in the flavor of the songs (something we think is really missing these days). No simple backbeats or dime-a-dozen grooves, this stuff is full and intricate, but without losing too much emo or pop-punk flare.
Since the drums were going to be so important for this album, we decided that we were going to record the drum kit as detailed as we could. We actually ended up hanging 14 microphones on a 10 piece drum kit, and boy was it crispy. Here’s all the places we decided to hang a microphone: snare top, snare bottom, kick front, kick back, little rack tom, big rack tom, small floor tom, big floor tom, hi-hat, stereo overhead pair, room stereo pair, and room mono. The goal here was to have more than we needed for parallel compression, punchy toms, and epic space. We can’t wait to hear how these mixes turn out! Follow Heartbreak Renaissance on their Reverbnation Page to follow their release dates.