We got everyone into town (Myrtle Beach, SC) today, and started the Meet and Greet at 6PM. We've got four guys here with a possible fifth coming from Canada. Everyone drove; two from Florida, one from North Carolina, and one from New Jersey. Most of them brought some of their own gear with them to A/B and use in the workshop.

We used a couple of hours to introduce ourselves, give some background, go over an outline of the workshop, and talk some shop. Then adjourned to a nice Japanese restaurant - where we caught the end of the AFC Championship game. Go Colts!

Tomorrow we'll get started at 11AM. The entire day's going to cover drums. We've got a few kits, around 10 snares, 20+ cymbals, mics, pres... We'll cover tuning, tweaking, miking techniques, pre selection...

As time allows I'll post reports and pics during the workshop. We've got a good group of people here. and I'm looking forward to digging into the week.

Any questions or comments you folks might have about the workshop; feel free to pipe in.

Definitely keep posting what you guys are doing! I'd love to be able to attend one of these workshops of yours or Ronan's some day!!

Aux bus routing and summing still kind of mystify me and so does the term "mixing stems" I'm from the land of Lud

Cool, Dan! Wish I could have been there-

Well, I said as "time allows" in that first post...

The workshop started right in the middle of ongoing renovations. If the room looks a bit like an old punk club, that's because that's what it used to be. More on the renovations...

We kicked off Monday, Jan 22 with an intensive workshop with drummer Russ Whitman. Everything starts with getting a good drum sound. And the best way to begin to to do that is to thoroughly understand the drums themselves.

In the drum workshop everyone got a drum, and we stripped everything down. Taking off all the lugs and heads until there was just a shell. Then Russ built up, one by one, the construction of the drum - from materials to bearing edges to properly seating a drum head to tuning...

Here Russ Whitman demonstrates the difference in the sound of a drum by moving a piece of Moon Gel just a half of an inch.

Here we start firing up the kit. And over time exchanging some of the cymbals and snare drums.

Tuesday morning we spent a lot of day going through a fairly large selection of mic preamps. And getting everyone to understand with their ears the difference between transparent, clean and colored preamps. We started with the Millennia HV-3D - as it's the most transparent - and when all the way through the preamps, ending up with the most colored, the Sebatron vmp-2000e.



Later in the day we had a band come in to begin tracking. Drummer Russ Whitman's band, Eason, provided a song we used to build on throughout the workshop. Tuesday evening was spent getting the drum and bass tracks cut and locked in.

[ I don't seem to have any pics of the band sessions. Maybe someone from the workshop has pics. ]

We spent all day Wednesday on microphones. A few of the workshop members provided acoustic guitar and vocals as source. We also brought in a sax player who quickly ran through about 15 mics.



We spent the afternoon and early evening tracking the band Eason's guitars and vocals for the source track for the workshop.

On Thursday we auditioned more gear. And then spent a good part of the day on applications of dynamics processors and effects. Also editing, mixing, and applications of programs such as Drumagog and Melodyne.

Here TLS workshop engineer/musician, Brian McKenzie, demonstrates drum replacement techniques using Drumagog.

Friday morning we continued working on more mixing of the Eason track.

In the afternoon I had everyone over to my new room that I was just getting moved into. It's a new addition on to our house, and we'd been working on it since September. By the end of January I was just getting moved in. At this point, the paint was still drying.

We spent time listening to a lot of the A/B preamp and mic tracks we'd recorded throughout the week. Also didn't some DA comparisons with the Benchmark DAC1 and the Lavry DA10. I wanted to give everyone a chance to listen to some of the work we'd done during the week on a different and more advanced monitoring system.



We went out Friday night for a nice dinner at a local place, The Hot Fish Club.

Saturday morning was spent covering various aspects of the studio and production that some of the members wanted addressed. The weather was also getting nice, and a couple of the members wanted to get an early start home.

Brian and I ended up with one member left by the afternoon. And we spent the next few hours mixing a song he'd brought in. And we were able to send him home by Saturday evening with a finished mix of his song.

No pics from that day.

As the workshop ended, TLS still has some things in progress. Brian and I have had the band Eason in for a couple more sessions. Then we've spent time on editing and tweaking to get the song really moving. At this point we have one last mix session to check things and put on some final polish.

Then the raw WAV files for the tracks are going to be sent to everyone at the workshop. And we'll ask for them to mix the song themselves - with all creative license being up to them. Then online somewhere, as a group, we'll all critique the various mixes - including the one Brian and I did.

We also have all the recordings of mics and preamps that were tracked on a CD that will be going out to everyone.

So, it ain't over yet...

Hey Dan,And fellow forum members
how ya doin' brother, great to hear eason's been
back in a couple times.That Russ is a frigg'n human drum machine.I can't wait to hear these tracks in my studio.They got F'n Mojo bro.I must say I was blown away when I heard what could be done In a live room that on first inspection seem like it would be an acoustical nightmare.I know you hear alot about the gear all the time,But the talent/preformance of the musicians and the engineer/producer's golden ear's can't be found in a sweetwater catalogue.Dan thanks for the mind set to just not settle for an o.k. sound,But to keep working at it till you get it RIGHT! Plus the time spent with Russ going over the entire kit from total stripped down shells to seating and tuning each drum was priceless.I'ts the first thing I did when I got back from the workshop.....A+ improvement.I was really impressed with the gt44's that we shot out and recently picked up a pair of st44's which are supposively the same mics and for my room, they are my new drum overheads replacing my Josephson c42's! Jersey Bill

Ahoy, Bill! You snoozin? : )

Good to see you pop in. Brian and I have done a lot of work on that Eason track. Have a session tomorrow where we're hoping to finish the final mix.

I think you - and others - will be interested to hear some different versions of the track. We could have "settled" quite a while ago, but we've just kept carving away and refining it.

Let us know more on how it goes with the ST44's.