The Valves recording studio

First Session
This week saw our first attempt at a real recording session. With everything more or less in place and working, Mike, Tom and I descended on Steve and Joy's lovely abode for the first actual recording of a song. For a whole variety of reasons, we decided it would be best to record the band in sections rather than with all 11 of us at once, and so tonight was going to conecntrate almost exclusively on recording drums. Since it was the first session, there was a lot of trial and error happening with regards to mics and mic placement. We did eventually get a good drum sound and had a few stabs at recording actual songs. Unfortunately, since I was busy running all this stuff, there are no actual photos of the recording as it was happening.

Once again back in the control room. For those who have been following along, I'll point out the newest additions and changes.

To the right side, we see the deck and effects units that have been present for a while, but now there is a keyboard in place. This keyboard is for the board, not the computer. It allows me to enter things like what's going on each track and numerical values for settings. At the top is a Yamaha DTX, which is actually the " brain" for a Yamaha electronic drumset, but for this session it's been patched into the board through the patchbay to be used to set a click track. Whenever recording in smaller sections like this, a click track is a good back up to have so we're all on the same page tempo-wise while recording overdubs.

Once again the lovely mixer, above it the PC monitors show Cubase, the program we'll be using to do mixdowns. Just to the right of the board, you'll see a gray box with a blue plug on it. That's used to transfer files from the recorder to the computer.

A close up of the monitors. The sort of ragged looking horizontal lines on the left monitor are actual images of the signal from each track. The right monitor is Cubase's mixer. What all this amounts to is that the recording itself is on the first step. Mixing will be done within Cubase

Here you can see two mice one for the PC, the other for the mixer. This keyboard is for the computer, but the monitor is for the mixer.

And finally, this is what we were recording. Tom's Tighty Whitey drumset. You can see a few of the mics on the set. It took quite a bit of changing mics and moving things around to get the sounds we wanted, but the advantage to having your own studio is you're not paying some sap 50 bucks an hour while you're doing it.

Once everything was set up, we did some actual taping. Mike set up roughly form where this picture was taken and played guitar and sang so Tom would know where he was in the songs. The next step after this will be to get the rest of the rhythm section in to do the bass, guitar, key's etc. Horns will be after that and then finally vocals will be done last. As soon as we have something ready, we'll post some audio up here and you cna finally hear what the fuss has been about.