Roy Moonen – Born From Pain – Survival

Band Name: Born From Pain – www.bornfrompain.com
Drummer Name: Roy Moonen – www.roymoonen.com
Album Name: Survival
Release Date: October 31 2008
Studio Name: Antfarm
Engineer Name: Tue Madsen, Jacob Olsen

Cymbals: Zildjian

Zildjian 14,25” K Custom Hybrid Hi-Hat
Zildjian 18” K Custom Dark Crash
Zildjian 19” K Custom Hybrid China
Zildjian 20” K Ride

Drums:  Tama Starclassic Performer (Birch)

22" x 18" Bass drum (Evans EQ3 Batter Clear + Resonant Black for Bass)
12" x 9" Rack tom (Evans EC2 clear)
14" x 12" tom (Evans EC2 clear)
16" x 14" Floor tom (Evans EC2 clear)
14" x 5.5" Snare (Evans Power Center Reverse Dot + Evans Hazy 300 Snare Side)

Pedals: Tama Iron Cobra Power Glide Twin Pedal HP900PTW

Microphones: 

Kick Drum: Sennheiser E901 and Sennheiser E 602 II
Snare: Shure Beta56A on top and SM57 on bottom
Toms: SM57 on all toms
Ride and hat: Oktava MK 012 on both.
Overhead: 2 of AKG C414
Ambience mics: 2 of Superlux CMH8G

Studio Tips:

For these recordings we made guide guitar tracks with a click. I prefer a guide track over a guitarist or bassist playing along with the recordings because if they make a mistake whilst you’re playing one of your best takes you probably end up making mistakes as well, so that will be frustrating.

When you play along with the click track, do not try to nail every click, but play mainly on the 1 so there is still a feel to the music, therefore you don’t end up playing like a robot.

Always put new drumheads on the drums before you go into the studio. But make sure you play/break them in, so the drumheads will be seated on the drums and won’t detune that quick. With tuning the drums I always tune the top drumheads in tone as a triad, so the tone distance between the toms are equal. The bottom head is tuned almost the same pitch as the top head, but then a touch tighter. So the tone won’t drop down.

Also I use Moon-gel for controlling the top heads of the toms and the snare. With Moon-gel you can easily control and adjust the length of the sustain.

Every song I use a new pair of sticks, because the stick loses its bounce after a while, so this way every song has the same attack, this is especially noticeable on the ride cymbal and the snare.

I had an average of three takes a song for this album. I use the first take to get comfortable with the tempo of the click track and then the second one I try to nail it. From experience I learned that more than four takes is too much and the results after that won’t be as good as the first couple.