My Studio Experiences

Photo taken at The Recording Company, September 2021.

Lets do a deep dive into my studio drumming experience. In this article I will discus what it is that I love about recording drums, and my personal involvement with studio sessions.
My recording history started back when I was in high school after my parents bought me an interface, a seven pack of drum mics, and a license for PreSonus Studio One. I was about 16 years old at the time, and this was my first time I had ever dabbled with recording drums. When I was in elementary school I would have my parents buy me blank caseates and I would record myself with a caseate player. I sadly have no idea what happened to those recordings, now they’re just fond memories. So, after my parents bought me all the equipment to record myself I immediately started setting up my equipment. After some time messing around with mic positions and learning the basics of using a DAW, I started recording drum tracks for my band at the time. The band I was in was called King Pariah. Long story short, that band lasted for about 5 years and we accomplished some pretty cool goals that I am very proud of to this day. My first experience with recording drums at home was not great. I was very young and inexperienced with what I was attempting but that what was so fun about it. I learned a lot about myself as a musician and how I like working. We recorded our first album entirely at my house. Looking back, it may have not been our best decision because of how much farther we progressed following our release. But, recording drums helped me learn a lot about the instrument and how you need to be precise and accurate when recording, which at the time I wasn’t.

Amidst the ending of the King Pariah chapter in my life, I joined a band called I, Conqueror. When I joined I, Conqueror they already had their first album written entitled “The Last of Us”. All I had to do was record drums. This was my first experience recording drums in a professional studio. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. We recorded six songs on drums in one day. I wouldn’t do that now especially with how hard these songs were to play. I like going through a song several times and making sure each part is played to the best of my abilities. But, when we recorded drums neither myself or the rest of the band had been in a studio before that day and we didn’t know exactly what we were doing yet. We kind of rushed our time there but I learned a lot that day. I had a ton of fun recording drums that day. One major thing I learned from the engineer Jake Mannix was that at the time I wasn’t hitting evenly. The volume difference between my right and left hand was pretty significant, it was something I had never noticed before. The “Last of Us'“ was recorded in January of 2017, and was released that November.

The next album I recorded drums on was “The Dark That Ate The Light.” This was the sophomore release for I, Conqueror. When we went to record drums we wanted to be in a comfortable environment and have full control of everything. The guitarist/singer Josh Gagnon had spent a lot of time learning how to record drums to the best of his abilities, so we decided it’d be best to record drums at my home studio. We took our time and applied effort where we believed it mattered. We focused highly on mic placement, room sound, and getting the most out of our gear. For me this was the first recording when I started thinking of the notes I am playing, and how and where to place them within time. When it comes to drumming and playing music in general, the notes played need to be in time. When recording drums, you have some play with quantizing. This was before I learned more about quantizing and how it helps and hurts drummers, this is a topic I will discuss in another blog at a latter time.
When we were recording the drums for “The Dark That Ate The Light” we put much emphasis on consistency of velocity. With our previous release “The Last of Us,” my playing varied a lot in the volume I was getting out of my drums. So, we focused on trying to get each hit to be as consistent as possible, and that helped a lot with the sound of the record. “The Dark That Ate The Light” was recorded in March 2019 and released in November 2019.

With the current band I play in called Last to Fall, we have recorded five songs and up to the posting of this blog we have released three of those songs. My absolute favorite recoding sessions have been with Last to Fall. Every time we hit the studio it just feels more professional and exciting. I feel myself learning more about the art of recording drums and building fun working relationships. When I was younger, I was always scared of recording drums in a legitimate studio. I always feared what the engineer would think or say about my playing ability. This is why I had always felt more comfortable recording at a home studio. That way I wouldn’t be pushed out of my comfort level, and I would never be in a situation where I felt like I wasn’t good enough. That’s a dumb place to be. The major growth I’ve seen in my playing is when I am pushed out of my comfort area and with Last to Fall I have been pushed out of my comfort area.

Our first recording session was in February 2020 and was at St. Rose college in Albany NY. We recorded our first single “Forgiveness.” This song was a ton of fun to play and I had practiced the song a lot before going in to record. This was a pretty low stress situation. It was only the one song we were recording that day, and I had known the song pretty well. We had recorded the song in one of the theatre rooms at the college.
Our second session was in September 2020, and we recorded two songs that day one of which has yet to be released. The song that has been released is called “Emotions Tied To Past Lives.” When we went to record this song we recorded it in the official recording studio at St. Rose.

Our third recording session was done with Tim Lynch at The Recording Company. When this was brought up I became nervous about recording drums with a person I didn’t know yet. I typically revert back to wanting to record where I already have, because that is what I am comfortable with. So to combat these thoughts of not being worthy of recording drums in a truly professional sense with a person who does recording as his full time gig. I practiced…A lot. I wanted to have this song so tight I only needed to play through it a few times during our session. I was truly trying to impress my band mates and the engineer with how tight I could get the song. After all the hours I put into practicing this song, I found myself setting a new goal for myself for when Last to Fall hits the studio. My new found goal for recording drums at the studio is to use as little quantization as possible. I want people to hear me.
The song we recorded that day was “Heaven You Made.'“ Which to date has been our biggest release yet, with over sixteen thousand YouTube plays and nearing fifteen thousand streams on Spotify.

St. Rose September 2020. The “Emotions Tied To Past Lives” session.