Last weekend I recorded my newly tuned drum set with my drummer, Ron, from our high school cover band and who both went on to play with Chas Sandford for about 2 years before he went on to become famous.
Ron always wanted to play Theme For An Imaginary Western in our cover band but we never got "a round tuit".
Since Citizen Regen did a cover version (of course with the great Hugo Ribeiro on drums) I decided to give Ron the opportunity to give a go with his take on the song. Ron has not kept up with playing for a few years so he was a bit rusty. After a couple of mic test takes of maybe the first minute of the song or so, he did three full takes.
As it turns out his first take was the best overall and so all I needed to do was fix about 3 or 4 kick hits over the whole song. They were just a 32nd too early for my taste, being the producer and all.
For the techies, I used my AEA R88 for overheads, Earthworks DM20 on snare top, SM57 on snare bottom, Shure Beta 91A mounted on a shock system in the kick, Shure Beta 52A on the kick hole and a Solomon Sub mic on the kick resonator head. Sennheiser e604 on toms and e614 as spot mics on all cymbals (hats, closed hats, ride and three crashes). I used my Sphere mic, in stereo mode, as a room mic and mixed the room using UAD's U47 modelling on the Sphere. All the mics were run into my 3 UAD Apollo 8xp units (I needed 19 inputs in total).
During mixing I felt my Mapex Birch/Walnut snare had just too much ring and so I made the decision to use Trigger2 from Slate and I found a better snare sound that fit the song (for my taste).
Ron like the results.
Here is the final mix. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8um1b4cj1kjvnq0n0tcqi/TheForAnImaginaryWestern-RonDrums.mp3?rlkey=8fjxn3p5p4lc40d3s7tdct2vx&dl=0
This was the make or break test on whether I was going to keep the drums and all the mics. I'm sure with a more solid drummer I'll get even better results.
Conclusion: I'm keeping everything. But will be looking for a couple of alternative snares to keep on hand.
