Drums: a beautiful instrument, a hip shaker, a heart beater, a zen tool, a PAIN IN THE ASS TO RECORD.
I've always battled anxiety when the day comes to playing drums on albums. Am I gonna play the parts as well as how I hear them in my head? Or is it going to sound like that dude at Guitar Center trying to show off the licks he learned from that Neil Peart instructional video? It's kinda like getting over the horror of hearing your recorded voice for the first time, except with drums I hear that every time I record.
But when we went to the rehearsal/recording studio on Wednesday to begin recording drums, much of that fear wasn't there. I'm not sure why, but not being in a fancy recording studio probably helped. So did Andy's excellent engineering, that helped make the drums sound so good in the phones. So did the drums themselves, which I borrowed from our friend Joel, who has them sounding AMAZING! All the exciting power and energy that we felt in rehearsals seemed to easily transition to the tape (or hard drive--whatever). It was a good feeling.
Wednesday evening we set up all the equipment that Andy had stuffed into his Toyota (I had jury duty that day). Then Andy applied his signature mic-setup scheme, and he got some sounds. By the end of the night we had one song done.
Thursday I got out of jury duty by 11:30am, so we were at the studio by around 12:30pm. For the next 14 hours we rocked our pants off, getting nine more jams down. I started freaking out because we were making almost every song faster from the scratch versions. By around 11pm I wondered if that one afternoon coffee (I'm not a huge coffee drinker) did something very wrong to my sense of time and space. Andy agreed, though, so maybe it'll be all right. Eric was there helping out on Wednesday night, and Jeff came by for a while yesterday.
My guess is that this coming Wednesday night, we'll get together and see if everything really sounded as good as it seemed to Andy and me.
Posted by wayne at March 13, 2004 06:36 PM