Goldangit!, having been bitten by the "we're graduating in five months, screw high school, let's get famous" bug, has taken on the task of recording a decent sounding demo on a budget of $0. Given that half of us are veterans of the perpetually debt-racked Flu Season, this should be no problem. Unlike Flu Season, though, we've opted to revisit the issue of recording acoustic drums. And this is where most of the work supposedly lies. Open yourself a new tab, cue up your favorite search engine, and type in "how to record drums." The results will invariably mention at least fifty billion Shure microphones (upwards of $100 each), a truckload of soundproofing, and a producer who knows what the fuck they're doing. Goldangit! has none of this.
Things that Goldangit! does have:
-One Toshiba laptop equipped with the finest in free shitware, aka Audacity.
-One Peavey four channel mixer
-One condenser microphone, two dynamic mics (technically three but one is borked), with a boom stand and a... not boom stand.
-More cables, cords, plugs, and adapters than we could ever know what to do with.
-One drum kit
An afternoon spent tinkering with the aforementioned has revealed that unless you're going for studio quality, all the gear we have is all we need! One mic inside the bass drum, one duct-taped to the top of the bass and angled toward the snare, and one centered overhead to pick up cymbals. Switch some switches, slide some sliders, and a decent mix is suddenly attainable! Even Audacity, a program which has endured due to its ease of use and certainly not for its reliability, manages to handle the influx of signals relatively well. I would personally prefer Mixcraft since it has a sleeker design and more mixing options, but carrying a computer tower all the fuck around town is not something that's ever grown on me.
I think our success ultimately comes from the Peavey mixer, which has fared me well for the past three or so years. The controls are minimal but what it does offer is plenty. All that's left to mess around with is panning the cymbals but for an hour of working and three of bullshitting, we managed to accomplish and learn a lot today. Perhaps I'll post another "studio" update tomorrow while drums are tracked and lyrics are written.
And yes, Goldangit! is always stylized with the exclamation point. Might as well try to force some subconscious excitement, right?
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