We set up an unusual Drum Recording day at Far Heath Studios with recording engineer Angus Wallace. Angus came up with his idea a while back after being inspired by tales of early U2 records having their drums recorded in a metal booth or box to get a big and trashy sound - We were interested so arranged to be there with cameras to follow the progress.
Sadly, the RP house was broken in to a few days before filming and all of the cameras and lenses were stolen so rather than abandon the day we decided to press on and film with an iPhone. Angus also had a friend come with another camera to help. As it happened, the iPhone footage and audio was used for most of this filming. It is grainy, not as crisp etc but it did a remarkable job.
Watch the video to find out how things went but in summary, a really good B&K Omni mic did the best job of capturing this interesting sound. We hope that this inspires others to experiment and look forward to requests from others to come and film alternatives of this concept or other interesting methods.
Please note that except where stated in captions, all of the audio captured was by the iPhone. We were surprised at how good it was.
We want to record more interesting drum, guitar, vocal etc recording techniques so if you'd like to be involved and showcase some of your methods that get great or interesting results please get in contact. Recording really can be fun and as we found, it's all down to coming up with ideas and taking the time to try them out. Even if you don't get the results that you expected something different may come of it. As it turned out here, we discovered that the metal booth actually became an instrument in its own right!
Special thanks to Angus Wallace at Far Heath Studios for giving up his time and studio but also to Andy Fox (additional camera) and Jonny Mattock - Drums and Iron sheet percussion!
