I had the opportunity to step into the studio with some of the members of Mitchell, South Dakota’s Kanata (pronounced Canada). Kanata consists of Drew Grohs, Cory Nace, and Adam Wells, lead guitar, bass, and rhythm guitar respectively. They label themselves as Experimental/Metal/Rock and I think you would be hard pressed to stick them in just one of those boxes. After almost five years of playing shows together in the South Dakota area they’ve found their way to my doorstep. Adam and I had been in contact for some time before we nailed down plans to hit the studio and we are now in the process of putting out an eleven-song album.
The first order of business was figuring out what we were going to do about drums. Kanata has been without a drummer for some time and Adam suggested we use the samples available in the studio. This was a new experience for me and involved quite a bit on my part. MIDI drums, even with samples applied to them, often have a rigid, somewhat robotic sound. With the help of Nathan Edwards I spent the day “humanizing” the drums. This involved quantizing the beat so that it was randomly slightly imperfect, adding velocity change and using a variety of samples for each instrument. The results were pretty promising, and with a bit more fine-tuning I think it will be near indistinguishable from real drums.The three band members have a pretty stiff work schedule so our window of opportunity was pretty slim. Adam and Drew arrived into Madison pretty late Monday night. We set up and Adam recorded with his Schecter C-1 Diamond Series guitar out of a Randall RG100SC. I close mic’ed the cab with two Shure SM57s, one at the top of the left cone and one at the bottom of the right cone. I then set up an AKG 214 as a room mic. The different microphones and placements offer a pretty wide variety of tonality so I don’t have to do a bunch of equalizer work and I can get a pretty natural sound. This went into a Digi Pre mic pre-amp and then into a Toft ATB 24-channel mixing console. I like the gain and control the Digi Pre gives and I like the coloration the ATB board adds. Drew went to work with his Schecter Hellraiser V-1 and he utilized a Marshall MG4X12B for its speakers, with the amp of a Peavey 6505+. I used a similar but slightly different mic’ing technique to further aid in giving the guitars separate sonic personalities.
After about six hours we figured we were all too tired to function. I offered them some somewhat illicit sleeping quarters and called it a night. Our goal was to finish recording both guitar parts on the rest of the tracks so they wouldn’t have to haul all their gear back another day. We made quite a bit of progress before breaking for lunch at Skipper’s. After a minor snag or two we managed to complete all guitar recording by 10 PM. Their bass player should have the day off sometime next week and we’ll continue hammering this album into existence.
