Remote Asistance Part One: Oxide Lounge and Old House Studio

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One of the "big concept" things I want to acheive with this album is to enlist the help of other talented engineers and musicians I know in a "remote" fashion: that is to say, utilize our fabulous new technology that the internet has afforded us of-late in order to gather performances from far-flung locations. So, to that end, I asked for drum tracks on a few of the songs to be performed, engineered, and recorded by some good friends of mine whom I know through the TapeOp message board and annual conventions .

Tony San Fillippo runs a studio in suburban Illinois called Oxide Lounge, and Chris Garges is a freelance engineer out of the Charlotte, NC area whom also is cheif engineer at Old House Studios. Both are talented percussionists as well as talented engineers, and so I emailed them some rough mixes that incuded "scratch" (on-final) mixes of a few songs with electric guitar, vocals, and click tracks (a metronome tone to indicate drum tempo). They in-turn recorded to these scratch tracks on their respective tape machines, converted those multitrack files to digital (both use standalone RADAR digital 24 tracks as opposed to computer recording as I do), and then simply burned me a DVD of the files and mailed 'em off to me. When they got to my place, I then just dragged those files right into my existing digital compositions and I was ready to mix! So long as all parties involved make sure to have all their files begin froma common "zero point" on the timeline, syncing up tracks recorded at different facilities is never an issue.

This all worked great, and the only issue I did have was one of my own creation. The first time I sent them both mixes, I gave very little creative direction in terms of what I wanted to hear out of the drum parts, and as can be expected I got some performances (by no fault of anybody's but my own) that were not quite what I had in mind. So having learned my lesson, I got behind my own drum kit and added to my rough mixes some really terrible performances of my own simply foir Chris and Tony to use as guidelines for percussion. They went back to work and the next group of DVDs I received were STELLAR!

So, I think what I'll do here is just post some pics below that they sent me, and ask them to drop in any relevant comments they can think of regarding how they went about doing all this stuff.


Here's Chris Garges' Ambient Mic Setup


Some compressors at Old House


looking across the kit from ovver the hi-hats


Chris' kick mic positioning



A couple looks at Chris' whole kit

Another look at Chris' kit from the drummer's POV


A rack of preamps at Old House


Chris' room mic positioning


Chris' snare mic positioning





Tony rocks the kit at Oxide Lounge


Tony behind the board

Rehearsing and Recording in Batches

Go to Great Magnet Recording's Official Website
Check Out a Sample of My Music
Go to Great Magnet's (THE BAND) MySpace Page

So I figured after several years of "servicing" other bands, it was time to actually lay down some of my own stuff (I have a backlog of material) with the same care and attention to detail I've afforded others.

Everything I've recorded of my own material in the past has fairly screamed "DEMO", and there are two big main reasons why in my opinion:

1.) Fully digital recording
2.) Ill-rehearsed guest musicians

So, the first part is easy to fix: use tape. As for issue number two, I decided that the only way for me to really get the drums and bass to sound right is to actually rehearse the songs over several sessions AS A BAND with the drummer and the bass player. This way I can get that feeling where everybody "locks"—there's a certain feel that comes with three musicians in a room that really know and understand the material that you just can't get from bringing in a session player and having him learn and record the part in a couple of hours.

So, I enlisted my usual cohorts—Nathan Alfaro on the bass...

...and Paul Bertolino on the skins...

...to do just that. They had the thought that it would be best to rehearse and record in "batches"—learn four songs really well and then set a date to record those. Take care of that and then move on. As of this writing we've done the first four, and are well into rehearsals on the next four. Furthermore, I've been keeping the drums setup in my studio pretty much intact while we rehearse and other bands come and go, so it seems to actually be evolving into a situation where we can record the new stuff on-the-fly during evening rehearsals once we're all comfortable with the tightness.