For a long time it has been our intention to blend analogue drums with digital drums to get that human feel to the electronic sound. Finally, last monday we were set to go! By having added a drummer to the ‘The Livelong June’ live set-up we now have a superb drummer handy.

This studio session though, was purely a technical trial and error session, it turned out. But definitely worthwhile!

So what we did was to have the snared tuned for a shot gun sound. The kick was already prepared to have a nice fat sound. The intention was to get that perfect sound already on the analogue drum set, but we didn’t manage to get the depth and mid/bass frequencies from the snare. So we decided to go for the character of the sound that we where after and to mix the final stuff in Cubase. Then we started test recording. To be honest it sounded crap in the recording room (according to the drummer). But, when we got the mix right it sounded amazing! Finally, the analogue feel was there!

Next step was to get the midi triggers in place and working. After some misfortune with broken cables we caught the midi signal and found a nice electronic sound for it. The initial mix of electronic and analogue sounded almost perfect!

By that time it was already getting late so we decided to postphone the actual recording session until next time. Really looking forward to that since this feels like the last part in ‘the quest for the livelong sound’..

When the recording is in place, next thing will be to mix it with the programmed drum patches that our top notch drum programmer has created.

What a milestone!