Reflections

Well, the BLASP has been completed for about 6 months now. We finished the Isolation room (mostly) and we've recorded an EP and are finishing up a full-length CD. There are several things that I learned that I'd like to pass along to anyone else considering any part of this project.

• Isolation Room
  • Less Sheet Rock - Two layers of Sheet rock on all sides is probably overkill. You can get by with two on the outside and one on the inside. Definatly use 5/8 inch fire retardant, though.
  • Carpet is good - Put Carpet down as soon as you can and put whatever wiring you can afford to under it, coming out in the CENTER of the room
• DAW
  • Faster HD - The most annoying part of the DAW has been that the hard drive has regularly not been able to keep up with all of the tracks unless they were cached. Buy a very fast hard drive *and* I/O interfaces that can keep up with it.. The SCSI hard drive is good, but needs to be ULTRA360.
  • 8 is not enough - 8 inputs just isn't enough for most recording needs. 16 would have worked *much* better for many of our recording sessions. Being able to record scratches of everything while you're recording drums is imperative. We had to mic the high and middle tom on one mic so we could record the drums and bass together, and we didn't get to include a scratch of the guitar or vocals
  • It's hard to "tune the room" if you're untrained when your putting up acoustic foam, etc. Using an A-B technique with a mastered CD adjusted for volume is probably easier for a home studio with a weird space than getting perfect sounding monitors, which will pretty much be impossible on a low budget
• Studio Equipment (Mics, etc)
  • More Rode NT1-A's please If I were to do it all over again, I'd get 4 Audix I-5's, a Kick Mic and 2 Rode NT1-A's. Total = $1000, which is just a little more than what I spent anyway for 2 Audix I-5, a Drum-Mic kit with 2 overhead compressors and kick drums and 1 Rode NT1-A. The Rode NT1-A's are inexpensive and sound fantastic. This will definatly be the first addition to the project once there is any income
  • Definatly use the snake The snake has proved invaluable. Don't try to do a studio without it

I'll post non-mastered mixes of most of the songs off of our upcoming album in the next month or so once they're finished recording and mixing.

Finally.

It's been a year since I announced that the B.L.A.S.P. project would commence. But we've now gone through a round in the Studio. Here's a link to "Sweet Secret" - it's just a preliminary mix, but it shows what we can do with $5555 and OSS, baby!

DAW - Ardour and Recording.

Ardour is now in it's 0.99 (which is thier fully functioning version). We used it last weekend to record the drum parts to 3 of the songs we're putting on the Green Letters next EP.

"Sweet Secret", "Eat at Joes" and "Carol and Me"

Carol and Me was interesting because of the fact that it is in both 5/4 and 6/4 (alternating). We were able to use Ardour to set the sections of the song that were 5/4 and 6/4 and Hydrogen to generate the drum part in both sections as well. I think we got some good takes of all three songs.

We prepared the room by removing all of the non-recording equipment / drums from the isolation room. We put the drums underneath the low ceiling. We put the Shure Mic package on the 3 toms, and just inside the hole of the kick and we put the overheads about 3 feet apart, equidistant from the snare, about 6 feet high and pointing at the hi-hat (OHR) and ride (OHL). We then took the Rode NT-1A and put it at the other end of the room way up toward the ceiling to get a nice room noise.

When we listened to the rode track, it sounded very good just by itself. We will definatly be trying a drum track using only that mic during the recording process.

Progress is being made. We are hoping to have the songs mixed by the time we go to the December 16th show.