Danga Island comes to town
2019 kicked off in fine form with a 4 day session for long term collaborator and man of mystery from Danga Island.
He and his musical muse, Cam Cooke, were down from their bohemia of Dangar Island, and had drummer Mark Spence in tow from Port Macquarie.
The crew had hired a beautiful mansion in Annandale with view across the city, and next to an allegedly haunted church. The sessions mainly took place at Musicfeeds aka Megaphon Studios with DI’d guitar and bass, whilst the focus was on great drum takes from Mark. By night a bit of extra tracking was also conducted at the mansion.
With all the inevitable large swirling psychedelic guitars and synths to come, we decided on a tight, smaller room drum sound, with a couple well placed room mics that allow us to expand the drums into a more splashy big room sound.
Notable elements in this session were;
The kick sound. We created a tunnel to avoid spill into the kick mics, and used the legendary D12 on the inside, plus a TLM107 on the outside. The TLM107, just keeps surprising. It seems a workhorse for a widest possible range of applications; vocals to kick drum mic ing.
The snare also sounded gorgeous, and for this session we taped both a AKG451 and a SM57 together for a bit of tonal flexibility in the mix.
Lastly of note, was the the movement between Pro Tools in the studio, and cloud-based multi-track recorder Soundtrap for the late night mansion sessions. Further, the acoustics of the large mansion were also of note and I look forward to hearing the takes back from those overdubs.
