Ananda Studios, just outside Cambridge played host to internationally-acclaimed drummer Gavin Harrison (Iggy Pop, Sam Brown, King Crimson) for a drum workshop, during which he revealed the secrets of creating a great drum take. It should be the first of many events to be held in Ananda Studios — a purpose built facility housed in the old Neve factory. Originally designed by Andy Munro, the studio was once used for R&D purposes and to demonstrate Neve consoles.
The event, hailed as “unique” and “inspiring” by attendees, focused on the demands of being a session player and how to deliver a great performance, even when under pressure.
After starting the session with some basic coordination exercises, Harrison, explained the drum part in a specific song and described the techniques he would employ to deliver and capture the sound. Afterward, those taking part were given the opportunity to play the drum part on his kit and have it recorded in Logic by Ananda Studio's engineer Neil Cowlan so that they could review their performance with Harrison.
"The opportunity to play along with Gavin and then have him critique my performance was great," said drummer Russ Tarly, one of the 24 people who attended. "This is the first time I've come across such a hands-on event and it worked really well. I knew I wanted to do it because it was so specialised. I'd love to see more events like this because I'm sure there are plenty of other drummers who would enjoy going through this experience."
Two Prism Sound Atlas interfaces in the Ananda Studios equipment rackTo ensure the highest possible audio quality throughout the recording chain, Ananda's Neil Cowlan deployed two recently acquired Prism Sound Atlas audio interfaces, which were used to track nine microphones from the drum kit into Logic Pro. Look out for a review of the Prism Sound Atlas in coming months. Find out more about it here.
As the latest addition to Prism Sound's professional USB interface family, Atlas is aimed squarely at multitrack recording applications. Atlas benefits from Prism Sound's 27-year history in digital audio processing and interface design and incorporates the company's latest award-winning CleverClox dual hybrid clocking technology as well as eight of the company's acclaimed microphone preamplifiers as standard. The Prism sound mic preamps are based on the very successful Orpheus preamps, but are upgraded with 20dB pads now available for all inputs. Atlas offers analogue and digital I/O for Mac or Windows PC at sample rates up to 192kHz and, in addition to the USB host interface, Atlas also features Prism Sound's new MDIO interface expansion slot, first incorporated into the Titan. Using this miniature expansion slot users can, for example, directly connect to Pro Tools|HDX systems and can also run with Apple and Windows native applications over USB. Other expansion cards are slated for future expansion of computer interface options.
For Gavin Harrison's workshop, Prism Sound also loaned Ananda Studios a Lyra audio interface for additional monitoring. The microphones used for this project included a Shure SM91 and AKG D12VR for the kick drum; a Shure SM57 (top) and a Beta 57 (bottom) on the snare, an AKG C451 on rack toms and a Shure SM57 on floor toms.
Cowlan says: "The Prism Sound Atlas interfaces performed flawlessly, both during the Gavin Harrison workshop and at a private seven hour session that took place the day before. They are truly amazing AD converters and mic-pre's that sound fantastic. It is no surprise that Prism Sound units are found in some of the finest recording studios in the world and the fact that we can now offer them, too, gives people another great reason for coming to record here."
"The live room [at Ananda Studios] is a fully acoustically designed space that sounds wonderful for anything you can imagine recording. Drums, string quartets, guitars, vocals, percussion – it all sounds great," Neil Cowlan says. "We also have a large range of microphones, pre-amps, EQ’s and other equipment to cater for almost any project, along with a huge collection of guitar and bass amplifiers including Marshall, Fender, PRS, Orange and Matamp."
Following on from the success of the drum workshop, Cowlan plans to host similar events at the studio and will be announcing these very soon.
Prism Sound's sales director Graham Boswell, who attended the workshop with Bernhard Nocker from the company’s sales and marketing team, adds: "We were delighted to be able to support this event by loaning the studio equipment and look forward to working with Neil again in the future."
