On the second last day of 2009, I had the pleasure of returning to my old elementary school to record a full band track. The school was shut down in 2004 when only 4 kids attended the facilities, which sadly sums up rural remote Iceland. Now the house is run as a hostel during the summer and is pretty much unused during the winter.

The building is split into 2 parts, the teaching facilities and a large hall with a stage. I decided to use the stage to record on and use the large hall and the basement below the stage for real-life reverb. The stage felt like a comfortable area to record in as you had thick drapes to close off in any direction which I could use for primitive acoustic treatment. We were using a Digi 003 and a Focuserite OctoPre LE 8. The band set up, drums, bass, guitar, keyboards. The drum kit sounded excellent, a quality Tama set with a beautiful Premier Maple snare drum, which the drummer told me cost about as much as a new car.

The bassist was using a Fender Jazzmaster, the keyboardist a Nord Stage 88, both DI'ed into Pro Tools and myself a old US Fender Strat ('79) with a Mesaboogie Dual Rectifier Vacuum Tube Amplifier and cabinet. I have always loved the sound of a DI'ed Fender Jazzmaster or Precious bass. Usually I do not bother with using amps or virtual amps but rather fiddle about with compression and EQ. The Nord Stage keyboard is simply amazing as it has one of the warmest and nicest sounding organs (Farfisa, Hammond and more) I have heard and the Wurlitzer A200 knock-off sounds as good as it can get. My Mesabooge cost me a fortune in the day but I always looked at it as a investment. This 4 valve channel monster simply sounds and looks amazing and you always seem to get just the right sound out of it.

Our mic selection was limited. We had a MD421 on the snare which sounded crispy and clear, a Shure Beta 91 on the Kick which we laid down on a pillow inside the kick drum, had a lot of attack and low end, and finally dual KSM137 for drum overhead in a spaced X-Y which worked surprisingly well, however I might have positioned them too close to the cymbals as I was relaying on them to pick up the occasional tom hits as well. The Mesaboogie was equipped with a SM57 which was pretty standard. I am interested in experimenting with unorthodox mics on the amp, but the opportunity does not come up often. We used 2x MXL V63M for the room reverb, one down in the basement and one in the hall. These mics have a lot of internal noise so the reverb tracks were not perfect but somewhat useful.

We recorded everything live, but instead of playing the entire song, we only repeated 1 part or pattern to a click until it was sounding extremely tight. Then we simply arranged the different parts together in Pro Tools. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the overdubbing and mixing sessions, which I will share with you in due course.