Jams Duncan.

New Rule: All blog posts must have a pun in their title.

I really want to write about some drum recording I did with James Duncan recently. Halfway through the session I was kicking myself for not bringing my camera for photographic evidence of some of the stuff that went on.

If you have been reading my blog you may remember that James has been helping out with Chelseas solo album, well he got in touch recently about helping with a bit of tracking for some of his solo stuff "we might play around with drums through amps and stuff" how could I refuse?

On Wednesday we headed down to drummer Chris O'Connors practise space armed with my laptop, digi003, mic pres and a joint effort from our Mic collections and a few drums. Chris is a really great drummer and his practise space is amazing. There must've been at least 6 marching bass drums littered around with various drum kits and walls of shelves packed full of percussive things including a very large spring, hundreds of cymbals and gongs and stupidly huge china's. I could've played all day. But no. We had serious work to do in a short amount of time.

We quickly plugged everything in and got levels before tracking various drum options to be cut in to loops/samples for 3 songs. This is not usually how I work, so was pretty interesting for me to see James producing a session like this, listening for all the various loops he wants to use.

Then we got to the fun/serious recording; running a Hi Hat mic in to a Wah pedal and in to a little guitar amp in an isolation room. We put the Wah next to Chris's HiHat pedal so Chris could slacken off his HiHat clutch and play the Wah. Probably the best use of a Wah pedal I have ever heard. We also ran a kick mic in to an amp, the snare bottom mic through a reverb and in to another amp and then a tom mic in to a hotcake and then a delay pedal that James played for a while, should be some really cool samples from that recording!

Then Chris had to leave and James and I recorded various samples of cool things like timpani, the aforementioned giant spring, snare drums out in the hallway, foot stomps, various cymbals stacked together... etc.

What a fun day recording with some very talented people (Chris and James)