Dead Sea Souls – Natural Progression

On Saturday I was back in the studio working with DSS on the single again. So far we have done the guitars as well as guides on vocals. This week we tackled the drums and being a live band this was an important part of the production. As the track has been clocked to a MIDI metronome we decided to do the drums in conjunction with a sampled Kick Drum. This was quite tricky for Dave the drummer as he wasn’t used to playing with a click but on the day he came through with flying colours and nailed the parts really well. Half the battle in getting this right is to provide the right headphone balance and in my experience it’s a really important part of an engineers job which isn’t always appreciated. To begin with Dave was well out of sync with the backing track and the band wondered if he was actually able to do it. After spending a fair amount of time on the headphone balance it became obvious that once he was hearing things right his timing was bang on, it just gelled and from then on we were able to record a great live sounding drum track. The initial take was him playing just snare and hihat. Because of the syncopated feel it wasn’t possible to do the snare rolls seperately without sounding unnatural. Once this was done I got a seperate take of the hats on their own. I then spent a fair bit of time fiddling with the takes to get some stray beats in time. After that Dave added ride and crash cymbals.

For the samples I used Addictive Drums, coincidentally the kit I was using was actually the same as Dave’s Tama Kit. It was uncanny how similar they sounded. We then added the toms from the sampled kit to finish off the track. I shall probably spend a fair bit of time tweaking the drums before the next stage of recording which is the lead and backing vocals. We did the guitars last week using the bands Fender and Marshall amps after doing the initial guides on the Line6 Pod. Once the vocals are done I shall revisit the Bass guitar with bassist Gary Burns using the Fender Bassman studio combo which suits the track really well. I like to do the bass at the end as I find making decisions using eq, compression/limiting etc easier when I can hear the elements of this pop/ska song that are complete.