24th of December - Drum Battle (358th Song)

Is there a better way to celebrate christmas eve than playing drums with a very friend of mine that plays drums too? There was the last chance to record such an event, so here we go!

Thoughts: Yeah, very good to play do a drum battle, Iñigo is a very good friend, we already made a song together for FORTUNA, it's called Pancher Records from the 14th of November, I'd haven't done a drum battle before and I'm glad I did it in my first year of FORTUNA Quest, just near the deadline. To do it I had to choose which mics I should take to record 2 drums in a small room. You know that I don't have much cables or stands, I have two stands that works perfectly, but I only have one working shock mount, the other one doesn't have the middle piece, I have 3 XLR cables and one XLR to Jack adapter, and my interface has 4 XLR input plus 8 Jack ones. 

So my choice was the next: I took 2 condenser mics, which must be placed in the shock mount, and to do that I had to place 3 rubber bands in a way that hold the mic without it slips and fall off. Now I have one cable and no stands, I decided that I should take the AKG D112, which is this big mic that captures low frequencies and is normaly used for kick drums. I placed it in front of both kick drums in the middle. Since I didn't have stands for it and I wanted them to look to the center of both kits I placed it in the whole of two toilet paper rolls and plugged it and now it could look forward without any problem. A lot of cheap fixings today. 

We checked the levels and then talked about what to do, very easy stuff with individual solos in the course of the battle alternating. We did just one take, and our ears where whistling in the same pitch, he just sung it and it matched to mine. 

In the mix I put the left mic which aimed to my drumkit panned to the left and the opposite with the other one, and I realised something that didn't expected but makes a lot of sense, since the bass mic was placed in the middle both kick drums sound in the middle too, so even when a solo is more in one side the bass drum is still sounding in the middle which is weird. That's the problem of having few equipment. I also realised that that mic captured so much of the rest of the instruments, normally it's inside the drum kick and the other sounds don't get in so much.

Merry christmas to everyone and have a lot of fun today as I did.

Enjoy it!