I recorded my drum tracks for Johnny Flynn‘s album Country Mile in May, 2012 at Soup Studios in Limehouse, East London. We wanted to try something different this time so at our bassist/producer Adam Beach’s suggestion we went for the legendary Glyn Johns three mic setup. In this case it involved two Coles 4038 ribbon microphones in very specific relational distances from the snare, and a third mic way out in front of the kick. Soup’s engineer Giles Barrett described it in more detail in a post here and put some audio samples up on soundcloud to illustrate. They also had just wired in their new reverb chamber which sounded fantastic. Listen:

I think I want to record all of my drum tracks this way from now on. This is an excerpt from the song Bottom of the Sea Blues. I was literally just inventing the drum part on the spot. I swear it makes sense in the context of the whole song. In fact it is by far one of my favorite songs to play live at our shows now. It always lifts the crowd up a bit.

Oh yeah, one more aside, the famous recording publication Tape Op re-tweeted Giles’ post so I had a few kilobits of fame there for a second.

If you are looking for a studio in London I highly recommend Soup. They used to be located in a tiny room underneath the old Duke of Uke store by Brick Lane, but moved further east a couple of years ago to a bigger space and set it up really nice. It’s a great room, great equipment, great sound, great engineers, just great. My friends The Wave Pictures also record there all the time. I can’t wait to get back there again sometime soon. Check them out!