I have mostly recorded myself for years. Now, I'm going to help my friends record an EP. We're all dads going nuts in a pandemic, and we have no budget, but it feels right to try it.
They are a three-piece (drums, guitar, and bass-vocals), with a sound somewhat like Unwound, Fugazi, etc. Loud and fast. We all feel like it makes sense to try to capture as much as we can live, as that's how they're most comfortable playing.
Locating a space we can safely share is hard. But we will probably have access to a decent sized auditorium or, in a pinch a large, cathedral-ceilinged room that was once a restaurant in our town.
Gear-wise, I have my trusty Fireface 800, which gets me 10 inputs. For mic pres, I have a Hamptone JFET, an old ART 2 channel thing, and two DIRYE CP5s I just built. For other preamps, I'd be using an old Mackie 1402, then sending direct outs to the Fireface.
I'm most concerned with micing the drums, because that's what I've done the least. How does this plan sound?
- Drum OHs - Oktava 012s in an XY pattern
- Kick - Sennheiser 421?
- Snare top - 57
- Snare bottom - Sanken CS-M1 (this is a hypercardioid I use for field recording)
- Room mic - TapeOp ribbon into a RNC
- Scratch vocal - Rode NT-1 maybe? (He is really loud, so maybe this should be the 421? Or another dynamic?)
- Guitar cab - either the other TO ribbon or a LDC
- Bass - DI
I know I'm going to have a lot of bleed here, but I think we can make it work (and be prepared to do a bunch of takes rather than try to comp it later.) I'm also planning to get my hands on a bunch of OC 703 and build some gobos to put around the amps and the vocalist.
Are there any screamingly obvious mistakes in this plan? What would you change?