Recording Done, Now Onto Mixing & Mastering

The weekend is officially over and the bad news is that my recording of "We Three Kings" is not ready. The good news is that I got a very good overall snare drum sound--probably the best I've ever recorded. Took me three sessions to get the final drum track I was pleased with.

There is still plenty of work that lies ahead. As I wrote in the last post, I used four separate tracks for the drums. I now need to combine those four into one. Not because I want to have it all on one track only but because I have used more tracks than I technically have available. My recorder is marketed as a 16 track but in practical reality it only offers 12 tracks; 8 mono tracks and 4 stereo tracks which are counted as 2 each. And one of the stereo tracks cannot be used for recording on because its purpose is to act as the track onto which the mixdown is bounced onto. At the moment I have 15 parts of which I will have to bounce some. Putting the 4 drum parts onto one track and the four horn/brass tracks onto only two should probably do the trick. Plus I also have to clean up any noise on some of the guitar tracks. After that I will make EQ adjustments and create a mix of all the tracks. Finally, after I have the perfect mix I will have it mastered. But to all of you who do your own home recordings you know how the process goes.

I'll be spending hours doing all this tomorrow with the intention of having the song ready on the following day. After that is all complete I will try to figure out what I will do next. Anyway here are a few photos of my drum recording setup: