My new song, “Dark of Day” just went live!
This is the first song from the new album, “Fallen Sparrows.”
The amazing Phoebe Silva on Violin, me and my hat on all the other stuffs.
Mike Stilkey did the single art, and I’ve got Grant Turley and Jherek Bischoff to thank for mixing and mastering respectively. I’ll have to talk more about how awesome they are on a future post.
This is actually the first (and so far, ONLY) track I play a full drum kit on. Often I prefer to use a djembe, or only play one or two drums (three tops) at a time, since drum kit is a beast all on it’s own.
But I thought this song really needed it, so I gave it a whirl.
Usually these days in the studio, people tend to put a microphone on each individual drum (some even get two), but for this I prioritized trying to capture energy rather than having the ability to perfectly balance and mix each individual drum.
So instead of using a bajillion microphones, I just used 1 to capture everything.
That’s what folks used to do once upon a time. Older Beatles recordings used this drum-mic’ing technique for example.
My drum performance isn’t note-for-note perfectly aligned to a metronome, but that’s what I like about it; it’s human.
Adding humanity into recordings is a big part of what I am trying to do with music, since there is soooooo much highly produced music where everything is always perfect and precise; there is so much music out there that is made with a computer, with a person never actually touching a real instrument.
And yes, I could do that, but I’m not interested. The world will have enough of that without my participation.
What I’m interested in is real humans with real instruments. And as humans, we are imperfect.
I strive for the perfectly imperfect.
Jakob Berger & his hat 