On 3rd of December Jussi headed to Mikkeli to record some rhythm guitars. The goal was to complete as many of the tracks as possible with Mikko's Orange stack. Mikko's sound will be used together with Jussi's Kettner gear, so that a different rhythm guitar sound will be used on the left and right channels.
The microphones used were Shure's SM 57 and Beta 58, with a very close proximity, and almost directly on axis.
5 songs in total were completed, and more is to follow in a short while.
Welcome to Hanging Garden’s studio journal. Here we make some effort to document the making of the bands yet unnamed third album.
On this album we decided to use our own experience and try to find a personal sound by doing all the recording ourselves, in various atmospheric locations instead of a clinical studio environment.
The band members possess a good deal of experience from recording, as well as good gear to do it, so the decision to DIY was not all that bold.
Friday 11th of November - Drums
Thus, on friday afternoon we packed a pile of different microphones, a 16-channel interface, drums, stands and our selves into two cars, and headed towards Nino's Spleen Studio in the forests of Pernaja with the goal of recording drums to 9 songs that we have been working on for some time now. The nature of the cabin, with its high ceiling and wooden interior make it a delightful place to record drums.
Having unpacked the drums, Antti began to change the drumheads and then tuning the drums. For this album he decided to use coated drumheads for toms for a warmer sound, and a rather low tuning, which should go well with the feel of the new songs.
Here is the arsenal of microphones we then unloaded on the table:
After this we tried to get the 16ch mixer/firewire interface to work with the PC laptop, but to no avail. After fighting with the damn machine and its drivers for 6 hours, we decided to call it a day.
Saturday 12th of November - more drums
After placing the mikes, we left to fetch Jussi’s Macbook Pro from the town. After some further trouble with correct kinds of cable, and having found apparently the sole piece of the type we needed from the whole city, we headed back to the woods.
While not being a big fan of macs, I can’t comprehend why PC machines aren’t able to just plug and play like Apples? We stuck in the cord and started sound checking without any problems at all.
From the stack of microphones, after some trial, we decided to use the following:
Bassdrum: Beyerdynamics BD mic + Audix D6
Snare: SM57 on both top and bottom, with almost contact-proximity
Toms: Audix D2’s on the rack toms, D4 on the smaller floor tom and a Shure PG52 for the largest, quite low-tuned one. PG52 is usually used on the kick, but it works well on a large, low-tuned tom also.
Ride and HH: A pair of Röde NT5’s
Overheads: A pair of Röde NT1A’s
Ambiences: Another pair of SM57, placed on the upper balcony to get the best of the high wooden ceiling room ambiences.
After all the checking and rigging, we started recording. In this, we had no troubles whatsoever. On Saturday, we completed the drum tracks for 5 songs.
At one point, Mikko also had the chance of visiting the cabin for a few hours, and thus we managed to shoot some new band pictures.
Sunday, 13th November - finishing the drums
Slightly hung over, we finished the 4 remaining songs before evening, sampled each drum and cymbal on Antti’s kit, packed up and left. The clouds were hanging low, ominous and dark. Tracking is about to continue in some weeks’ time, propably at Jussi’s home studio.
