Description: Day 4 of Ronan Chris Murphy’s Recording Boot Camp in Vinceza, Italy. May 2011. Recording drums, acoustic guitar and guitars.
Keywords: home recording bootcamp DIY musician audio engineer courses producer vicenza italy studio drums acoustic guitar

Agenda Red

# Recording Boot Camp – Day 4

Fame at last

Let’s face it. We’re all in music to get famous? No? Of course we’re not, however, one of the great risks of dabbling in this industry is that you never know who might end up being interested in you.

I was intrigued to find an Italian reporter sneaking around Abnegat Studios. The reporter managed to spend some time with Ronan to understand more about the origins of Veneto West and the boot camp.

Back in the boot camp it was straight down to business with Day 4.

Recording Drums

There’s a sticky substance that I had never heard of before called Moon Gel. This magic substance can do wonders for drum sound in the recording studio when placed correctly.

Ronan demonstrated that getting the drums placed, beginning with exactly how the drummer likes them, can achieve a great sound before the mic. Through both tuning and other techniques, we can get them to sound how we want them to sound.

Ronan’s technique has a lot to do with getting the drums to sound short by making the heads heavier. He achieves this through some classic home-grown techniques (such as the Ringo Starr tea-towel technique) which is exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for on the boot camp: low-cost, practical and borderline genius (to learn more you’ll have to go to the boot camp!)

A considerable part of todays session looked at appropriate (and inappropriate) mic placement. We also looked at suitable mics for getting great drum sounds and how removing drums can achieve even better and more impressive sounds, believe it or not.

Recording Guitars

Having studied drums we looked into recording guitars.

This session began with careful attention to the behaviour of guitar amplifier speaker cones. We discussed important considerations such as the path of the instrument signal and potential phase problems caused by multiple mic’ing.

Acoustic guitars require different placement and microphone considerations. We looked at how mono could be much more effective than stereo and how we could achieve a very natural sound with a flexible stereo recording technique with no phase problems.

On this note (pun intended) we finished the session looking forward to (not only more pasta tonight but also) techniques to record both piano and electric bass tomorrow.

Interview with Ronan Chris Murphy
Recording Boot Camp – Day 3
Recording Boot Camp – Day 2
Recording Boot Camp – Day 1
Recording Boot Camp

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- Home Recording Boot Camp – Day 5 — Agenda Red
- Home Recording Boot Camp – Day 3
- Recording Boot Camp – Day 3
- Recording Boot Camp – Day 5
- Recording Boot Camp – Day 6