Recording Drums for Midnight Mystery Club
I was really excited to have two days in the studio with the guys from Midnight Mystery Club (MMC). David (singer/instrumentalist) lives in California and Llavar (drummer) is out of Atlanta, so to have both the guys in the same state and studio was a real pleasure! And in all honesty it felt really special to have someone fly across the country to work with me :). So, our plan was to track drums for six songs plus enhancing some programmed drums and bass tracks by running them through Chase Park Transduction’s 1975 Neve 5316 console, so we definitely had our hands full. With so much on the schedule to accomplish David and I had a conversation a week or two ahead of time about how to best utilize our time in the studio!
One of the things that David wanted to do was to use our first day in the studio primarily for getting sounds on the drums and running a few tracks through the Neve. Then use our second day to actually record all the drum takes. On day one, I was a little concerned because tracking 6 songs in a day is a lot and most sessions that I’m a part of are normally in the red by 2pm of the first day. Even though I knew this was our plan, it was still a little stressful BUT we had a plan and stuck to it and to no surprise, Llavar came in really prepared at 9 a.m. day two and knocked it out of the park. We had four songs down by lunch…so we got Jamaican food to celebrate :) And hit the other two songs after lunch. So by 3ish we were done with drums! I know not every project is going to have the budget for working this way, but if you can make it happen, I’d definitely suggest it!
Being able to spend as much time as needed to get our drum sounds right on day one was really great. A lot of that time was spent tuning the drums, getting the right amount of dampening, finding the right snare for each track etc. Tight drum sounds, was the name of the game with this session. Some pieces of gear that were invaluable to our drum sounds were the Big Fat Snare Drum Donut and their Auto-Tone. These little guys really helped us keep the snare sound tight and capture a great transient. MMC has a really awesome sound. I’d say it’s 80’s vintage-inspired indie-pop with catchy melodies over a strong backbone of synth and drums. Check out their first album, “Reason Or Rhyme” here.
Here’s a quick list of the mics we used on these drums:
Kick In: ATM 25
Kick Out: Lawson FET47
Snare Top: SM57
Snare Bottom: Shure 98
Tom 1 & 2: ATM450
Tom 3 & 4: Josephson E22
High Hat: AKG 414 B-ULS
Stereo Overheads: ADK 67 @ 41” from the snare
Mono Overhead: Coles 4038 @ 41” from the snare
Close Room: AEA R88
Trash: EV635a
One of the best decisions of our two days in Studio A was taking the resonant head of the kick drums off to tighten up the kick sound. This isn’t a new recording move by any means but I had never done it before and man I’m so glad we did it. Throughout our time tracking we were all continually raving about the kick drum sound. It was really tight and punchy. Another move that was really valuable was paying close attention to the drum sounds fitting each track. It would have been easy to get good sounds and then fly through the recording of all the songs with the sounds being the same but before we started a new song we were all asking each other if the snare was the right drum, if the high hat eq was right etc. And on a couple of songs were were changing the EQ of the high hat because the song needed a more crisp high hat tone. You gotta serve the song!
Again these aren’t new ideas for tracking but I just mention them because it proved to be invaluable to our time in the studio. Studio sessions can be all about time management especially when theirs a limited budget for studio time and so every minute counts. For us the time spent getting the sounds right at the source per song was crucial.
The remainder of our day in Studio A was spend running tracks through the Neve and adding some color with the console EQ or outboard compression. This was a really fun process to treat the ITB tracks to some analog flavor! We used my Retro 176 on all the bass guitar tracks and ran many of the stereo synth bass tracks through the API 2500. The Neve 33114 eq’s were really great for adding some weight and presence to the tracks.
I hope this was entertaining and informative for you. If you have any questions about the gear we used, the process of recording, or just general recording questions, feel free to comment below or shoot me a DM on Instagram! Happy Recording!
