I don’t know how many times I have said that I love being an NYC recording studio, but after a great session like we had this weekend I am reminded of how amazing it is to be recording music in New York. We had the pleasure this weekend of working with the very talented rock band Not Your Queen’s English on Saturday recording drums for their new single. Besides the fact that these guys were a real pleasure in the studio, they also have a boatload of talent. The songs are well written, every musician in the band has a great command over their instrument, and they all work really well as a team.
Our job was to record the drums as awesome as possible. Of course, our job is always to record stuff as awesome as possible, but we generally make sure that things are recorded really transparent with not too much signal processing on it. But this time these guys wanted the drums recorded very close to how it would sound mixed. That meant taking a lot of time to get our signal chain just right, and boy was it worth the time we spend on it!
We didn’t use as many microphones on the kit as we sometimes do, largely because they used two fewer toms than we have, but we had a snare top, snare bottom, kick back, kick front, rack tom, floor tom, and two overhead microphones. We got the placement just right and the drummer tuned it up splendidly, then we had some fun getting our preamp settings right and putting an 1176 compressor on almost every drum mic. Then the key was to get the settings on our microphone preamp EQs and gain controls just right and dial in the perfect amount of compression for his playing style.
In the end, it was an excellent session that had us going away as happy as the band was to be here, truly a great feeling. Looking forward to more sessions with these local NYC rockers!