Checkmate – OUT NOW!

On Friday September 29th 2023 TerraDown released their EP “Checkmate”! Do give it a spin and tell me what you think!

This one is special to me, since it was my first big recording session. I planned to do a recording session as my final exam at the Conservatory of Haarlem and I found TerraDown willing to be the object of study. This recording marked the completion of my study at the conservatory and the beginning of my internship at the Trypoul Recording Studios and kind of the starting point of my career in recording. Needless to say, it’s a record that changed my life.

We recorded from November 28th until December 5th 2020 at the Neve Room of the incredible Trypoul Recording Studios. It turned out to be the heaviest session I did to date (7 days of working 16 hours a day), but, oh boy, was it worth it! The mix and master have been done by master of the craft Ivan Panferov at Anthropocide Studio. He absolutely did an amazing job! (Did anyone say loudness?) 

Below you find a few photos taken during the recording.

NERD ALERT!!! If you’re interested in a in-depth nerd view on the session, you’re safe to read further!

Drums were tracked with 20 mics among which a real AKG C24 stereo tube mic on the overheads and 2 pairs of rooms. Boudewijn played his own DW kit with 4 toms, 2 hihats and never enough cymbals. The whole crazy setup can be seen below. 

The high gain guitars were tracked with 3 mics (R121, SM57, U87) and a DI each. We placed the amps in the control room and used long speaker cables to the cabs, which were placed in iso booths. (Funny to mention: Jasper’s cab we placed in the Vintage Room with the Neve 8014 console. Most expensive iso booth thinkable 😂) Jasper used a Mesa Boogie Mini Rectifier and Mark used a Laney Ironheart. Both hooked up to ENGL cabs.

We tracked Joris’ bass using a U5 DI and my own Fender Bassman 800 amp with 4×10 cab miked up with a vintage U47FET. And of course a Darkglass B7K pedal; you wanted metal, right?

Nick’s vocals we tracked using an SM7B with an LA-2A compressor on the way in. Quite standard, but it really did the job (because it’s quite standard)!

Except for the clean guitars heard on Checkmate and Revive The War I only used the internal preamps of the Neve 88RS console. For those guitar parts Jasper played Trypoul’s Fender Twin Reverb amp miked with a vintage U87 and C414, tracked through a pair of vintage Neve 1081 preamp/EQ’s.

I committed to the sound I made with the EQ’s on the 88RS and used a bit of onboard compression on the way in on the room mics for the drums. All channels were converted using only Prism Sound ADA8 XR converters.

Any questions left? Ask me!