Tuning Helps

After recording Saturday, we realized and learned something very important...

Mark, being the more technical part of Shutterwax, has always had trouble finding space for the bass when mixing. We really like a big drum sound and have been happy to date with the drum sounds we were getting, but have had to wrestle with getting the bass heard without it overtaking the entire mix.

I tried something novel... I tuned my drums. I previously enjoyed a bombastic drum sound and left the tuning very deep. My kick drum outer head was completely slack while the inner head was barely taught. I enjoyed that marching drum sound. Unfortunately that sound was also taking up every available frequency for the bass hence rendered the bass inaudible.

I'm a bit embarrassed at this revelation as I would never go into the studio and play an untuned guitar (although I can't say it's never happened), so why wouldn't I bother to tune my drums? Not being my main instrument, the drums always end up as an afterthought which can happen no more!

I went crazy before our session on Saturday and decided to tune the drums up a bit, matching the inner and outer heads of each drum and bringing the kick drum up close to an E below middle C. This made an incredible difference. The kit doesn't necessarily sound great alone but it fits in perfectly with what Mark and I are playing on guitars and bass. The definition is there where it wasn't previously. We are very pleased to say the least.

Now we have to rethink the recordings of the previous songs and we may revisit them with our newly learned tuning/recording techniques...

The latest recording is for a song entitled The Feminine Mystaque. We have the rhythm tracks down but I'm now rethinking the arrangement of the song. I'll be thinking about it all week and will hopefully have a solution before the next recording session on Saturday... Perhaps I'll record acoustic demos of each and post them on the site for your input.

Thanks for reading!
Jeff