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 is an Audix i5 probably used for replacement for the SM57 by Shure, obviously on the snare. This is one of the Audix mics that I hardly ever use. I really don't like it. The mic comes in at drum package and it's obviously shaped similar to an SM57; however, to me it does not sound like it. You can judge for yourself but I think it sounds really harsh in the high end. It doesn't handle loud noise, loud sounds as well as the SM57 in my opinion. I've used this on guitar cabinets, snare drums, snare top and bottom, and I really haven't liked it or found any use for it yet, so you can judge for yourself. This is it.

[TRISTAN PLAYS A SNARE DRUM THROUGH AN AUDIX i5]

You'd have to excuse my lame one-handed drumming but you can hear the sound on the snare. It's an aluminum snare, and yeah to me that's a little too harsh and it's not really the sound I'm going for with the snare drum but I'm sure there's a use for it somewhere.