AA Recording Project - The Notorious Daughters 'Rain'

I recorded this three piece band on 2nd June. I put the drums in the live room in order to use a room mic, and the guitar amp in the dead room to isolate it. The bass was DIed and the vocals were overdubbed in the control room.

After auditioning the U87s, I chose the AKG C414s as overheads. We pulled the resonant skin off the kick drum to get cleaner tone as we weren't happy with the timbre we obtained with the skin on. Standard mic configurations were used on the rest of the kit including an sm57 on snare, beta52 on kick and beta56s on toms. An sm57 and an md421 were used on guitar amps and the guitar track was doubled a second time with identical settings and mic configuration to achieve the uniform and symmetrical wall of noise common in 90s grunge.

In the mix I applied EQ and compression judiciously to every track. The room mic was gated slightly with the snare in to particularly give it room. I aimed to fit the kick underneath the bass guitar using EQ and also used a compressor on the bass that was triggered by the kick in order to help clean up the low end.

Rain