Recordings

How the recording side actually works here

For several years the whole point of this hobby was capture. Not writing, not arranging — capture. Getting a real drum kit and a real guitar cabinet onto a hard drive in a way that sounded like being in the room with them.

Drums

Recording drums is the reason I got into any of this. It is also the hardest thing to get right, because a kit is not one instrument — it is eight or nine sources in one room, all bleeding into each other’s microphones, and the bleed is not a problem to be solved so much as the sound itself. The overheads are the record. The close mics are seasoning.

Most of what I’ve released in recent years uses programmed drums instead, which is a different craft: a programmed part that sounds human is mostly about velocity variation, ghost notes, and not quantising the life out of it. Playing drums for thirty-odd years turns out to be excellent training for programming them, because you know what a human physically cannot do.

Guitar cabinets

Cabinet miking is where the obsession lived for a long time. A single dynamic microphone on a 4x12 will give you a dozen completely different guitar tones depending on nothing but where you put it — dead centre on the dust cap is bright and aggressive, out toward the cone edge is rounder and darker, and an inch of distance off the grille changes the low end more than most EQ moves will. Add a second microphone and you inherit a phase relationship you now have to manage. It is a rabbit hole with no bottom, and it is genuinely fun.

Mixing

Done in REAPER (opens in a new tab), which has been my main workstation across Windows, macOS, and now Linux. More on that, and on why the Linux part took some doing, on the Studio and Accessibility pages.