Our drummer is a good guy to work with, but doesn't keep great time. Since we were going to be overdubbing everything except the drums, the time needed to be rock steady because there's no eye contact when overdubbing. We practiced with a click for a month before recording to get him used to it, but if you solo the drum tracks the slight ebb and flow is audible as he slips off the click and tries to get back on it. He's pretty good at keeping in the pocket with the click on basic kick/snare/hat stuff. Long, busy fills are the hardest part. There are plenty of little glitches, but aside from drummers, most people won't notice anything.
The O-C 703 did a fine job of taming the garage. I used 2" thick panels to kill the mid/high ring and spread them all over. I made a couple big bass traps out of 4" thick panels to suck up the low end. The lead singer/guitarist and bass player were both running direct, in the garage with drummer so they could see each other. There is a tiny bit of scratch vocal bleed in the overhead mics that you can hear when solo'd, that you would never hear in the final mix. The fact they were in the room with the drums combined with the marginal acoustics, meant that I couldn't use a room mic on the drums in addition to the close mics. I like a natural drum sound and a well-placed room mic in a nice space can add a lot.
As an aside, we're not using any guitar amps for the recordings either. All electric guitar tracks are DI'd and we're using the Overloud TH2 amp simulator plug-in in my DAW software (Sonar X2 Producer) for all the guitar sounds. It's way cool to have the flexibility to change amps, cabinets, mics, mic position, and effects all the way to mixdown. It makes recording guitar parts simpler because you just have to pick the right guitar for the tone you want (Les Paul, Strat, whatever) and focus on playing it well, not nailing the final tone at the same time. The presets in the Overloud stuff are mostly crap, but you can craft very respectable tones if you start from scratch and build your own sounds.
We're just a local band of old guys (in our 50s) having some fun writing songs and playing with bands half our age. No aspirations other than wanting to share the music and have something to listen to and show our grandkids when we're in "Glory Days" mode in our rocking chairs on the front porch of the nursing home :-)
Well, building a enough of a following to play nicer/bigger gigs for better money to a consistently good crowd would be nice :=)
