There has been a steady distortion when I hit the rack tom. It's been there for years. I just limit it out. I have smacked everything in the room with drum sticks as hard as I could trying to find where the buzz was coming from. I found it. There were two problems.

Firstly, after a bit of troubleshooting, the Monoprice XLR cable from my floor tom to the mixer/interface had gone bad. We have a ton of electrical problems in Houston. It wreaks havoc on electronics when you lose power 5 times in 5 minutes. Touching the cable at all made a horrible cracking noise. I replaced it. The drums now sound balanced and clear. And BIG.

The other problem was the mic stand holding the overhead mic above the snare. Some metal piece inside has worked itself lose. Any vibration on or near the mic stand makes this metal thing rattle around inside. I have 2 of these model stands, and the other is fine. Once that stand is replaced, literally everything should fall together.

YES. The drums are sounding great, even better than before. The noise is gone, the clarity is crystal. There's no more distortion. I previously thought I had a good signal chain going for my drums. After switching from analog to digital, and even though I decreased my drum recording mic setup from 8 to 6 mics, I am now super excited to get back in the studio and track drums. My drums have never sounded better. They've been tuned and have been sounding just like I want them to.

A few days ago, I recorded slow jam session on the old signal chain going through the analog mixer before hitting the R24 as an interface. Today I recorded another jam session just to showcase the newfound quality in my drum tracks. I haven't been this excited and motivated to make music since I first started working on the first Wynton The Planet project back in 2008.

The noise in my drum recordings was starting to get to me. I'm looking for higher quality… well everything. So I grabbed some XLR cables and pulled the mics from the analog mixer. I plugged them directly into the XLR inputs of the Zoom R24. The quality of recording is so much better going straight to digital. Gain, gates and compressors were dialed way back. I routed 6 mics from the drums do the R24, then saved the last two inputs for whatever. Right now I have the AKG Perception 220 plugged into input 8 and nothing in 7. I can also route two channels from the analog mixer to the R24 so I can still use it if need be, but the 8 busses from the 3282 aren't hogging up all 8 inputs on the R24.

I saved all of my signal chains as I've gone. Today I went back to the signal chain for the Summer Breeze jam and recorded drums. Tweaked it a bit. I plan on repeating the process with all of my signal chains until they all sound good, but different. I strongly believe templates are the way to avoid anxiety.

I've been recording readings for my classes. It's easier to record it once than read it 5 times to 5 different classes. Did I mention how much I like playing drums? I've looked into getting a Master's in literally anything related to music so I could eventually shift from English into teaching music. Unfortunately I have a Business degree that does not translate well into Master's music programs. It's depressing. To be able to tune, play, record, maintain, and even clean drums for a living AT WORK would be much, much better for me.

It's frustrating to think advisor's and counselor's should had given advice that a Music degree doesn't mean you'll be broke in LA selling your soul. You could teach music. God I wish somebody told me that. Ugh.

Having a blast recording music. I'm happy with where the synths/organs are. I use 8 tracks and have a widespread of synths to program. I've started in on the guitar chain. I can go the DI box straight to the mixer and amp sim method, or the traditional mic in front of an amp method. The final guitar mix will probably use a combination of both.

When the guitar mix is closer to where I want it, I'll be updating the home page with a "Wyn Guitars" section similar to the drum section. Pictures, guitar makes and models, amps and effects pedals, mics, and of course audio samples.

The booth was being used for storage as I needed somewhere to put my snare drums. They add weird frequencies to the booth. Now that I'm working through my signal chains, it was time to reclaim the booth's isolation. Out the snare drums went. My snare drums are now on a rack elsewhere in the house. The booth is back to having nothing but a replicated main screen on the monitor, two passive speakers, a bass amp, a guitar amp, and a mic on a stand for vocals.

Going back through some of my old music for ideas. My signal chains are getting better and better each day. I feel like there's always room to improve, so I'm taking these old mixes and covers and attempting to finish them. I'm liking where I'm at sonically, so now the challenge is to get music tracked.

I don't write songs in a traditional sense. I keep most of my ideas in my head anywhere from a week to 5 years. When I'm ready to record, I grab a new Reaper template and sketch the ideas out as quickly as I can with MIDI. I rarely go back to these files. Now that the quality of my recordings is higher than it ever was, I'm revisiting these files and expounding on the idea. It has been extremely rewarding going through these old files.

I released a 10-minute solo jam today. I wanted to cover "Summer Breeze" by The Isley Brothers with my spin on it. It's an instrumental jam. Half way through it changes to some Mars Volta like chaos, no idea how I got there, but I liked it enough to share. I try to keep the drums thick and try to avoid over-compression. Of all my solo jam sessions, this is probably the one that's closest aligned to how I want my music to sound.

So I listened to the playback of today's jam session. Over and over. I am really liking where I'm at. It even sounds good on my phone. I've got the drums where I want them. The synths are DirectWave instruments/synths custom built with a few included basic Reaper synths combined in a signal chain in my host DAW Reaper. I refuse to buy a synthesizer until I'm better at keys.

Spent the entire day dialing in the drums. We are a go. Tuned, toned, gated, reverberated, compressed, limited. The drums sound fat and huge. Ludwig Acrolite can't get enough credit. That snare is amazing in the studio. It doesn't take special heads or special tuning or some hidden knowledge to make it sound good. It sounds good from the lowest tunings to the highest. At some point I'll buy a Supraphonic just to have one, but for now the Acrolite reissue is more than enough.

I also dialed in the synth signal chain. I did a quick cover of "Daisy Jane" by America. Vocals still sound a bit rough as I haven't yet dialed in the new vocal signal chain. Hopefully I'll get to it this week.

Still at it. Inverted the gates on my overheads and turned up the bass on the toms. It cleaned up the sound considerably. A lot of the low end boxiness is gone. I always seem to go back to the Ludwig Acrolite 6.5×14 with diecast hoops. I also swapped out the mics of the toms for an SM57 clone with a bit more gain.

I'm too cheap to buy Booty Shakers for my floor tom, so I put cymbal felt underneath the legs of the floor tom, and wow— I can see how they increase sustain. Considerably. It went from having an initial attack but died out pretty. It sounded lifeless and flat regardless of my EQing and compressing finesse. After mounting it on the felt, the floor tom explodes with cannon heavy bass that you can feel in your chest. There's a lovely linear decay that mimics a nice long release. Combine that with my 26×20 SUBKILLER of a kick drum, and you've got that thick, deep, warm low end that big maple drums are famous for. It records beautifully.

I've got a week off work coming up. This time will be used to jam with myself. I've got several more drum tracks to upload, including one I'm pretty sure is going to be the final signal chain. It took forever to dial this in, so much trial and error. Minor changes, then checking the playback. Running it through the mastering chain. Checking it in the headphones. Listening to it in the car. LIstening to it on the monitors. I've got it right where I want it. The kick is deep with a lovely rich attack. The snare is a lovely, fat, warm, thick crack Ludwig snares are known for. The hybrid cymbal setup with a 20" K Special Dry Ride combined with low volume cymbals records like a dream. This is the best my drums have ever sounded, and I can't wait to share my new music.