BOB POPP: Hi. This is Bob Popp of Gunpoint Recording Studios in Chicago. You can find us at myspace.com/gunpointrecordingstudios. We're going to talk about how I track some drums of the band that I'm in. I'm a guitar player in a band called Karma's Agent. It's myself, Mike Ballantine, Chris Jones, and Chris -- Mike Cinquini. [LAUGHING] Sorry about that.

What I did is we chose to record the drums with four channels: kick drum at a distance, overhead left, overhead right, and room at 16-1/2 feet. Why 16-1/2 feet? We don't know but we chose it, it was a cool number, and it sounded right. We moved the mic around until we found a place that it sounded good and we did that. This channel on this board, as I said before, this board was redone by Creation Audio, and the guys at Creation sat with me to work on these different modules to get these sounds. So, I like this one for kick drum quite a bit, and these two here, I use these next four basically for my overheads. So, I do kick overheads then I start my snares, top and bottom, then however how many toms I have, and then I work in some esoteric mics, far room, whatever, what not, extra kick drums.

For this recording that I did for this song, I chose kick, left, right, and room, and this is what we have. This is directly off the board into the MOTU 24 I/O. This is the kick drum.

[BOP POPP PLAYS BACK KICK DRUM TRACK]

This channel here is track number two, and this is one of the overheads.

[BOP POPP PLAYS BACK FIRST OVERHEAD MICROPHONE TRACK]

This track here is the other overhead.

[BOP POPP PLAYS BACK SECOND OVERHEAD MICROPHONE TRACK]

And this here is our 16-1/2-foot room mic.

[BOP POPP PLAYS BACK ROOM MICROPHONE TRACK]

For this recording, I chose to user a Shure Beta 52 for kick drum, 4 feet away, blanketed over the kick drum. We'll show you how we did that in a second. For our overheads, we chose a KSM 32 and another KSM 32. For our room mic, we chose an Audio-Technica 4047.