One Man Band

So I spent last weekend in Elektra with Gerry - he'd gotten in touch a month or two back saying he wanted to put down a few songs playing everything himself.
"Interesting", I thought.
"God, I hope he can play everything reasonably well", I thought.

Anyway, not too much to worry about on the playing front.
Good songs, in a somewhat mellow Ryan Adams kinda vein, but with more Steve Malkmus style delivery on the vocals.
We had a few false starts on the first song figuring out the best order to lay down the tracks in.
Any typical weekend of recording will pick up pace as it goes along, as everyone gets stuck into the rhythm of laying down tracks. That was a little more pronounced than usual on this session, since Gerry was "It" all the time. Once we figured out that Gerry was most comfortable drumming to an acoustic and bass backing, we got some decent work done.

Elektra has a new studio manager called Anders, who seems to have sorted out some of the maintenance issues that screwed things up for me on previous visits. In fact, I think I got through the whole weekend without being slowed down by technical woes at all. Have I posted about the importance of maintenance in a studio before? I should have.
Anders was kind enough to lend me his own Beta57 for the weekend - I've mentioned before how it's my current favourite on snare. Elektra also have an SM7 now, which got used on all electric guitar and vocal tracks. I had it hanging low over the area between ride, rack tom and floor tom to try and cover any close micing I might need of that area and it actually picked up a really good picture of the whole kit from there.
Definitely might end up using that as a gnarly kit sound mic.
Every time I use an SM7 I wonder why I haven't bought one yet.. must rectify that soon.

Everything was recorded to the Radar (a joy to use as always), and I used my API3124 whereever possible (kick, snare and OH for the drums, with the desk covering the rest). Bringing your own preamps is definitely a good call in Elektra - the Orion's preamps are pretty uninspiring.

So I'll be running off some mixes for Gerry this week, continuing work on the Stoat stuff. I really must get back to work on the Hounds stuff too.
Did I mention that I'm rejigging my whole setup?

That might have to wait until the next post..