Drummer Gavin Harrison recently held a drum workshop at Ananda Studios in Cambridge, during which he revealed the secrets of creating a great drum take.

The workshop 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."

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.

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."

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.

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