Back from our first session in the studio earlier today.  It turned out to be a total blast!  I was a little nervous going into it this morning, but after everything got set up we were completely relaxed.  We managed to get most of the songs done within 2 takes, and I’m really happy with how things have initially turned out!

Because of the acoustics in the studio room, the sound engineer had me remove the front head from my bass drum, then he attached two microphones to the drum: one right where the beater from the pedal hits the head of the drum.  Then he took a blanket and wrapped it around the front of the head towards about 2-3 feet out, creating a tunnel.  He then placed another microphone at the end of the "tunnel" to capture that sound (you can see the maroon blanket taped to the bass drum)..  I was pretty skeptical about what he was doing, but when I heard the mix the bass sounded great!

The sound engineer then placed two microphones on the snare, then placed two overhead mics above the set.  Intially I was a bit taken by his approach.  The last two times I was in the recording studio all of the toms were mic’d as well as the hi-hat and then overhead for the cymbals.  I was really unsure whether the two overhead mics would pick up the sounds (especially the crisp hi-hat).  After listening to the mix I was blown away.  The sensitivity of these mics were like nothing else, and it was amazing to hear the drum set’s sounds.

I got some really cool pictures from the day in the studio:

My drum set at the studio

The view from the recording booth (you can see my drum set through the window

Check out all the pictures on my Flickr site

We’re half-way through the demo recording process.  Next weekend we’ll go back to the studio to finish the vocal tracks, touch up on a few solos then do the final mixing.  Hopefully by this time next week we’ll have a demo CD ready to go out to the world!