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Drummer Dave Ramey kindly agreed to drum on the album on very short notice and very little time prepare. He did a sterling job though and we powered through the 15 tracks with a single take for each. I’ll probably end up cutting loops from the recorded material, taking care to keep most of the fills and flourishes that Dave added – these have really made the tracks come to life.

We worked with the kit that was in the rehearsal room. It’s obviously not the best kit in the world, but I really like the flavor it brings. There’s something loose and vintage sounding about it. The same goes for the room itself – it’s not going to give the same results as a dedicated drum room, but it has its own character.

I brought in my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra and recorded on 5 tracks straight to Sonar X1. I miked the snare with an SM-57 and the kick with a locally made Superlux PRO218A that I bought for this session. I used the Zoom H2 Handy recorder as a stereo overhead. Finally, I had an Audio Technica AT4033 a couple of metres back as a room mic. Now that I’m mixing the drum tracks and after working in detail on the seperate kick and snare tracks, I’m finding the room mic really useful for blending the sound back together and adding some cohesion again. I’ve also added a dash of reverb from the freeware epicVerb VST, again to add a sense of cohesion.

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So far I’m pleased with the sound of the drums in isolation, but there’s still going to be a lot of fiddling to get the drums to suit each individual track. I may also blend in some of the loops that we’ve using for the tracks up to this point – just for variety, if nothing else.

• CPU Intel Core i7-930
• Motherboard Asus P6T SE
• Graphics HIS HD 5670
• CASE Lancool PC-K62
• POWER CoolerMaster Silent Pro M700
• MEMORY Kingston DDR3 1333 3x2GB (6GB)
• HD 1 Intel X25-M 80GB (SSD)
• HD 2 WD Caviar Green 640GB

First off, the case (pictured) is larger than I expected, probably to accommodate those 120mm and 140mm fans. I planned to get the less blingy K58 or K60 model (no window, and not painted black inside), but they were out. I’m happy with how quiet the case is – obviously a large consideration when making music.

I’ve decided it’s a good time to finally move to Windows 7 – 32-bit for now, which means that I can sadly only use half of the installed 6GB ram. I’ll make the move to the 64-bit version once current audio projects that rely on 32-bit plugins are out of the way.  Either way, I’m very, very pleased with Windows 7 so far.

All my installs went without a hitch with some noteworthy items. The Windows 7 driver for the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra worked out of the box, but crashed when I ticked the “high performance mode” check-box under “settings” in the FTU control panel. I had to roll back with System Restore and re-install the driver, this time leaving the “high performance mode” alone. I’m currently running at the lowest ASIO/WDM buffer size of 128 samples with no problems (I ran the Core2Duo machine at double that – 256 samples).

I’ve decided to upgrade to the latest version of Ableton Live  Lite 8 (8.1.3) – I tried Live 8 on the previous machine, but had it crash on me in a show, so I stuck with Live 7. I’ve played my  last three SL shows on the new machine and so far so good with Live 8 on this PC, except for the little weirdness you can hear from 4:23 to 4:30 in the recording of Live Online #66: Core. Some of my channels dropped out unexpectedly and I kinda expected Live to crash, but it picked itself up and kept going. No idea what happened there ;^/

Finally,  a mention about install times for LA Scoring Strings. It installs off 5 dual-layer DVD’s for a total of 40GB. The documentation warns of a long install, saying that each DVD can take up to an hour to install. That was certainly the case when I installed LASS on the Core2Duo PC 2 weeks ago. Total install time was close to 5 hours. In contrast, the new machine did the install in close to an hour!

Oh, and a note about PC versus Mac. When mentioning my plan to upgrade my PC a couple of people suggested that I move to Mac. I thought about it, but decided to stick with PC for the following reasons.

• My Cakewalk Sonar sequencing software is PC only – I can install Windows on the Mac, but that kinda defeats the purpose, right?
• You can’t get a similarly specced Mac for double the price.
• I’ve never had a problem with XP and I’m more than happy with Windows 7. Honestly, reliability and viruses have never been a problem here.

That all said, Macs are still beautiful ;^)

I’ll update this post if anything crops up with the new PC, but if you don’t hear from me you can safely assume I’m happy as a pig in mud.