spent the last few days here at my private home studio tracking an instrumental trio.

drums, bass, keys all live in the same room.

drums were my cherry solid shell craviotto kit and zildjian k custom dark cymbals.

old zildjian new beats and istanbul agop hi hats. coated evans g2 heads with clear evans resonant heads. a small evans pillow in the bass drum, both heads were solid. fiberskin resonant head.

toms and snare had various muffling depending on the song. usually the snare weight leather dampeners and some of the new tandem drums weighted dampeners plus lots of gaff tape on a few songs.

kepplinger and craviotto snares

most drum mics were my grace 801 preamps which i'm becoming obsessed with. they capture such a full range of every single source. so much clarity and punch and top end and openness and they seem to capture so much low end out of things like kick drum and toms.

kick front head was telefunken m82
snare top was akg d190e
toms were clip on sennheisser 602
close mics on hat and ride were beyer m160 ribbons
stereo room/front of kit was aea r88 stereo ribbon mic

all of those mics were run into my grace 801 preamps from the mid 90s.

then i had a few random drum mics for some extra room sounds and other vibes to blend in.

i had a mono coles 4038 over the center of the kit. this was going into a capi vp26 and one side of my manley elop. this was the bulk of the drum sound.

ev re15 into a chandler tg2 on the beater side of the bass drum picking up the beater attack as well as some snare side of the snare.

stager sr1a large ribbon into a capi vp26 and daking limiter was placed in front of the kit pointing between the toms at the snare and moved to get the low end i needed out of the kick and toms.

ev 635a into a chandler tg2 and daking limiter sitting sort of over the bass drum pointing mostly at the shell of the snare

bock u195 FET into a daking preamp out in front of the kick drum

neuman u89 back about 15 ft from the kit into a daking preamp and the other side of my manley elop limiter

i also multed the kick, snare and mono coles to one of my old altec 1567a tube preamp/mixers and printed that mono signal as an alternate kit sound to use in sections or blend with the other mics.

felt like with this instrumentation that a mono kit sound just seemed to work so well, but i had the stereo aea r88 out in front of the kit to blend in to add a little stereo ambience and width to the drum picture on certain songs.

all tracked to universal audio LUNA with universal audio apollos. in the rough mixes i'm using a lot of the studer a800 and atr 102 tape emulations as well as the neve console emulation.

it just blows me away the sounds i can get with LUNA and the tape and console emulations plus some nice mics and outboard in what is essentially the lower level of my home.