In my last post I discussed a couple projects that I’d like to start, but I don’t have the materials yet. One of those projects is recording a drum kit using a dbx 676 mic preamp. Earlier this week Jason, the guy who asked me to do this project, was able to get a set of AKG drum mics for the studio. This is great because it was the main piece that was keeping me from starting on this. Last week we retrieved a drum kit from one of Harman’s warehouses and set it up in the studio, but unfortunately it was missing some pieces, including cymbals. Now that I had mics I decided to do a trial run of tracking the kit without the cymbals, just to make sure I knew all of the signal routing through the board, patch bay, and 676. What I discovered was only 2 of the 8 inputs into the board work. Apparently we have a faulty snake cable coming out of the wall panel into the board. This is a huge problem and has been another set back.

I contacted Jason about this and explained that we need a lot of new cables for the studio in order for this to be done. I explained that I could still make a recording with an external 4 input audio interface, but that the studio needs these new cables if they want to be able to use it for these applications. Apparently this is a result of the studio being set up in a hurry when the building was built last year. They didn’t give too much thought to multi track recording or recording in general, and just put a board and some rack effects in there without routing the signals properly. They don’t use the studio for much recording anyways so it hasn’t really been a problem.

Jason is going to talk to his superiors to see if the purchases can be made, and in the mean time I’ve been tweaking mic placements on the kit to get to know the mics that I have, and tuning and retuning the toms and snare to make sure I have the best tone when I finally have all the pieces I need to get this done. I’m a little frustrated because obstacles keep presenting themselves for this project, but at the same time I’m happy that the problems at work that I’m having are revolving around drums and audio recording, both things I greatly enjoy.

Also here are links to the DigiTech AMA thread, which I assisted in, and DigiTech’s soundcloud. 90% of the audio clips on the soundcloud are of me playing, and all of them were recorded and edited by me.

We are DigiTech, makers of guitar pedals and effects processors. AUA!
byu/DigiTechfx inIAmA