The Go! Team live session

Watch or listen to The Go! Team live performance here

The Go! Team is a 6 piece band featuring Sonic Youth
style guitars, 2 drummers, some samples, keyboard, and cheerleader
chants.  For our session in the basement, we had to reduce the second
drum kit to a single snare drum because of space limitations.  Too bad.

It's always fun to pull together a live session of high energy music
like this, first thing in the morning.  Even a caffeine addict like me
can get through it without a bit of coffee.

The Go! Team also plays musical chairs during the set.  Everyone moves
around taking their turn on guitar, drums, keyboard and vocals.   No
rest for the wicked recording engineer, as each musician brings a
different dynamic to the instrument.

For the gear heads out there:

We usually use Neumann KMS 105's for vocals with Urie LA-4 compressors.
That's what I used this morning.

On this session I chose Royer R-121 ribbon mics and API 225L compressors
set to old style for the guitars, and an 1176 for the bass which was
direct-in through a tube Direct box.  I also used a Yamaha stereo 1176
emulator plug-in to really squash the drums and dirty them up a bit.

We use Grace pre-amps on everything.

Ray Guarna
KCRW Recording Engineer