TRISTAN JAMES: I am Tristan James. I work as an engineer and a music producer for an independent label called Proletariat Productions, try to give opportunities to independent artists who mostly do kind of political, progressive, or radical work with their music.

CELINE ZAPHIRATOS: My name is Celine Zaphiratos, and I'm an engineer here at the studio and I'm also going to be a freshman undergrad in audio arts and acoustics at Columbia.

TRISTAN JAMES: This is our A room here. We do mostly drum tracking in here, some horns if we want some space, but we have a smaller room for that that usually works a little bit better. I'm going to be kind of auditioning some of the Audix mics that we have at the studio. Here's on toms, just for comparative purposes, I've got the D6 and then we will also try out the D1 and D2 microphones.

I have with me an Audix D1 microphone. I am just about to play on a Pearl tom drum for you. We use this a lot on toms especially, sometimes horns but not really. We tend to like the Audix microphones because they're really, really directional. They have like such a sharp, cardiod pattern that you don't have to really worry about getting cymbals in them and they actually have a decent sound to them for the price. So again, that's kind of what we focus on here. It's getting really useable sounds as little cost as possible just to kind of sustain ourselves as an independent studio and label. I think we've been pretty successful with these, and I'll give you an example of what it sounds like.

So, this is the Audix D1 on a tom.

[TRISTAN PLAYS A TOM DRUM THROUGH THE AUDIX D1]