Whew! We are two days into the project now. It has been an incredible time of exploration, reaching, and sound hunting. Tuesday (day1), we tracked drums and bass mostly with a couple of acoustic takes sprinkled in. After we set the foundation, we were able to begin exploring with percussive elements and sprinkles to put into the mix. My favorite moment from yesterday was when we stumbled upon a vintage synth on the other side of the studio. There is a song we are working on that has a sparse, electronic vibe that needed some extra mojo pads and synth basses to fill it out. We found this vintage Juno 106 sitting on the plate reverb chamber in Studio B and decided to plug it in and see how she sounded. It was perfect and heavenly. Not much we can show you just yet, but think about the intro to TV series "Stranger Things." Those sounds were created with machines like the Juno 106 and other vintage synthesizers that operate like this one.
I'm at coffee this morning. We're starting at noon these days so I am trying to take the mornings to clear my head before we go deep in it again. Creating requires a lot of focus and sometimes your brain can feel like spaghetti after long days in the studio. But, we are energized and excited about how this is coming out. I think that these are the best sounding drums I've been able to record to date. I found that one of the weapons used to achieve the sounds was the Epirical Labs Distressor to 'extend' the kick and snare hits, hard to describe but to my ear sounds like they phatten up. Then I am putting a Coles 4038 on the opposite wall of the drum room and smashing that through a limiter. This effect can make the drums sound HUGE!! and we all know we love HUGE drums.
I'm excited for today. My studio goal each day is to try something that I haven't tried yet. Yesterday was hardware synthesizer, I wonder what today will be....