Week Five: The maddening power of one small bass drum

A new week, a new bass drum. Our modest new kick drum has arrived. We continued on with the (brand) new tune this week, moving on to the song’s outro. We’ve spent a long time on the drum and percussion tracks for this one, but it’s definitely getting there. A good 6 hours of Saturday was spent tweaking the new arrival (tuning, recording, tuning, recording). We nearly gave up on it but after some persistence, eventually found the right mic placement to pick up some more of those desired low-end frequencies and less of those high, roomy thuds.

Synthwatch
Daryl purchased (another) new synth this week – a restored old Juno 106, which is working its way across the Irish sea as we speak. This brings the total number of synths Daryl has purchased since the start of LP2 recording to: 3.

During bass drum tune-a-thon we engaged in a nerdy argument which went something like:

D: Listened to that Toro Y Moi album, it’s great.
P: Yeah, I really like all that Sidechaining
D: Er, what sidechaining? He doesn’t use any
P: It’s on every track
D: No its not
P: Yes it is
D: No its not

This went on for some time before we eventually discovered that we were in fact talking about two different Toro Y Moi albums. That probably wasn’t blog worthy, but when you’re listening to 6 hours of bass drum, you’d be amazed at how it warps your sense of what is and isn’t interesting.

In between takes we are mostly listening to:

Toro Y Moi – My Touch (no sidechaining)
Toro Y Moi – Causers of this (sidechaining)