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“The Night is Dead” was completely written and recorded during May. Thanks for listening! I’d love to hear what you think.
The rest of this post is for the recording geeks. I’ve been recording my music in some form for more than 10 years. When you’ve recorded yourself as much as I have it’s easy to get in the habit of using the same mics in the same positions on the same instruments. You know it worked in the past, so it’s easy to repeat.
So for “The Night is Dead” I wanted to intentionally record in ways I don’t usually. Typically I start with drums, then layer in all the other instruments, only adding vocals once everything else is done. So this time I started by playing guitar and singing (I don’t usually play while singing). I chose a different acoustic guitar than I usually use for recording – it’s a smaller, janglier sounding guitar. For the rest of the instruments I tried to use mics I wouldn’t usually choose in places I wouldn’t usually put them.
The drums were probably the most different. I limited myself to kick drum, snare, and hi-hats. That eliminates two toms and two cymbals compared to what I usually play. I only used two mics on the drums. One in front of the kick, and one about one or two feet above the snare slightly slanted toward the hi-hats. This is the first time time in about six years that I haven’t used a pair of overheads for a stereo image of the drums, and I may start recording drums in mono more often! I really like the way it came out.