We decided we wanted to record and produce our EP ourselves. With a certain amount of expertise and equipment between us we felt, while it would be a learning curve, it would give us more time to experiment and get things how we wanted without having the large studio bills as, to be frank, we have a limited budget!
One of the biggest challenges with recording at home is the room. Most have lots of hard walls which produce reflections that are picked up by the recording microphones and can really thin or colour the sound.
We were lucky though that our percussionist, Shaun, had a great room that he had treated for listening to music so we decided to try recording the drums and percussion there.
Throwing Graeme in at the deep end after only a brief rehearsal or two, we spent a whole day and another evening just getting the drum tracks down, but I think you will agree it was worth it.
We used several mics to capture the drums with two overheads, an AKG kick drum mic, SM57 on the snare and then also decided (as we can record 12-16 tracks at once with our desk) to add some clip-on mics to the snare and toms. This gave us a pretty clear sound and a natural stereo mix across the kit.
The main drum sounds you hear on the EP are from the four main mics with a bit from the snare clip-on. We gated the tom mic tracks so only a hit would be heard from those and this let us add some extra depth to those sounds when needed.