Welcome to the lead up, through and out the other end of our upcoming album!

This week i had a nice chat with John, the owner of Twin Earth Studio. I wanted to see the studio and his set up. I also needed to know what i was in for equipment wise, it's not easy to step into someone else's recording set up without some knowledge of the way the signal chain is routed and options for outboard gear let alone the mixing console.

Thankfully John is a super friendly guy and more than happy to help get the ball rolling. I've chosen my mics and mic placement, using pretty standard drum mic placement with a few added mono extras to help glue the sound and add more punch, particularly to the kick and snare. So i will be taking my tape measure in and getting super nerdy about the setup.

For the recording nerds out there i will be doing the standard close mic setup with overheads as a spaced pair and a spaced pair of room mics but I'm going to have 2 snare top mics, a Sure SM57 as well as a Josephson E22 condenser and blend the 2 mics to taste. To add some focus to the snare and kick i am adding a large diaphragm condenser in front of the kit just above the top of the kick drum equidistant from the snare to the overheads. Also to help with snare and kick punch there will be a mic above the kick beater, snare height facing the side of the snare. These mics help "glue" the sound of the kit together.

I'll be putting my amp in a separate room with a mic and the bass will go straight into the desk via a DI. I will also have a vocal mic for singing This also doubles as the talkback mic. Jack will have a dedicated headphone mixer so he can hear what he wants to hear.

For the gear heads i will be going straight into the mic preamps of Twin Earth's Neotek Elite V2 desk, subject to change of course, only if any of the elements need a bit of a different flavour. I probably won't compress on the way in or even EQ, happy to do that work in my own setup at mixdown. John has Protools and i use Logic but all i need are the 24 bit 96k AIFF or WAV files from the sessions and I'm off and running. There's probably a full day of transferring, sorting and loading of the bed tracks in Logic on my computer.

Myself and Bret will be in the control room playing along for Jack to keep the live feel and keep him on track with song structure. I just have to hit record and front up to the vocal mic for Jack's guide. Over and over again 😉

Can't wait .......

Here are some links to our conspirators, have a look;

Until next time ....