Little Dave Price
The mixer is back this morning - it was needed for a diagnosis on the small mixer - but still requires plugging in. Somehow I know this is my job.
Soon after everything is working again, who should come knocking but Little David Price? Here he is.
One of our self-imposed limitations is the number of preamps we have. We're assuming that the vast majority of recording that we'll be doing here will be one channel, so there's no need for loads of input channels. The theory was that we could always go to a proper studio if we needed to record lots of channels at once, but as it happens the seven preamps we have between us is enough to record a kit perfectly well. (Let's not forget that most of the drums on My Brilliant Album were recorded with three mics. Oh, and millions of other brilliant albums...). The art will be in shuffling our selection of mics and preamps to find the best fit for each element.
So the moment finally arrives. Dave sets up the kit and we mic the kick drum, above and below the snare and a pair of overheads. We pipe Dave some cheerful pop music and he begins to play.
It sounds fucking great. Somehow the small dead room is not so dead that the sound is killed before it gets to the mic, but it is dead enough to kill the reflections from the walls. The result is a very pure reproduction of the source sound, which in the case of a few mics on a drum kit, is remarkably detailed and chunky. It is, in fact, the longed-for Small Dead Sound. It is very very brown.
Everyone is delighted. You can almost see the moment after about five minutes where we all go 'well, we're doing it here, then'. I suspect that we'd have liked it whatever it sounded like; the whole idea of getting our own place was to work with what we got. But I don't think we were expecting it to be that good.
