Such is the state of technology these days, that the very phrase 'home recording' immediately conjures images of solitary figures crouched over their portastudios, DI'ing everything in sight. Understand, then, that it came as a bit of a shock recently when I found myself standing in Kent band Exit's drum room. I'll say that again: drum room. Complete with a real, live, seven-piece Tama Royal Star kit.

The converted bedroom in this small maisonette flat is heavily hung with velvet curtains, and fitted with a padded door.

"It doesn't keep all the sound in, but it does stop the neighbours complaining too much — and it gives us a fairly dead room for drums, and occasional guitar and vocal parts," explains keyboardist, vocalist, and prime mover of the three-piece, Mark Knight.

Setting up the room took "about a week of hard work", with the hanging of the lurid yellow and purple curtains determined by Mark's earlier portastudio experiments in the flat's other bedroom: "It was all trial and error really, hanging blankets over the egg boxes, and seeing what it came out like."

The room is well equipped with mikes — an AKG D330 for vocals, and five Sennheiser SM200s for the kit: "I use them on everthing — on bass, snare — they're great."

The band pride themselves on their versatility — "We aim to suit the sound to the song", and so Mark and Bruce Smeath, the band's drummer, have spent a lot of time experimenting with drum sounds — 'close miking, ambient mikes — just trial and error again. You learn as you go along.'

A basic structure has evolved: a stereo pair above the kit for ambience, close overhead miking for each pair of toms to catch the 'click' of the head and the spill of the two Paiste cymbals, with (mike-lending permitting) a pair, top and bottom on the snare and hi hat. Bruce varies the sound still further through damping and tuning, and there is occasional 'tweaking' of the recorded result prior to mixdown, 'just to pull up the snare or whatever.'

Communication with the 'control room' — in fact, the flat's living room at the other end of a short, echoey hallway ('great for vocals!') — is accomplished via an eight-way unbalanced multicore, terminating at either end in an Accessit patchbay. The whole lot was installed permanently in the walls of the flat by the band's second vocalist, guitarist and all-round handy man, Baz Dock.

The 'control room' itself boasts at good collection of gear, the hub of which is a Ram Micro RM 10, used for rehearsing, recording, and live work.

Baz picks up the story:

"At first we had a Seck 12:2, which stayed with us precisely three days — it was far too hissy, and although it had more inputs than the Ram, they all went down to two outs... On the Ram you can route your 10 ins any way you like to eight group faders, matching up to the tracks on the eight-track."

The machine in question is the Fostex A80. The band are clearly delighted with this successor to the ubiquitous A8, but the move from Portastudio (a Tascam 244) to eight-track has created a few unexpected problems, as Mark explains: "I still think I have yet to better some of the mixes on the 244. Only having four tracks to play with meant we spent more time getting it right in the first place... eight tracks can make you sloppy."

To keep the sound quality up within the limitations of 4-track, Mark had already invested in his impressive mike collection. "Even though people would constantly push me towards cheaper mikes, with comments like 'Oh, it's only for a portastudio...'"

Following the old programmer's adage, 'Garbage In, Garbage Out', Mark stuck to his guns, got good mikes — and relied on forward planning for the rest:

"I always tried to keep a stereo image through bouncedowns. At the time I had a drum machine with Pre-Panned stereo outs, so I'd put that down on the first two tracks, along with a bassline, bounce track one on to track three, adding a keyboard part, then track two on to track four, with another keyboard part, which gave me the whole thing in stereo, on three and four, with another two tracks still free."

It wasn't long though before Mark and his un-MIDI'd Poly 61/DX7 set up were missing the feel of a live band; just over a year ago he got together again with long-term collaborator and drummer Bruce Smeath, to form the current lineup with Baz. All three maintain that 'live feel' is the most important unifying factor in their sound, and have geared the whole writing/recording process to that end. Bruce explains:

"For rehearsals, we monitor through headphones, with Baz keeping Mark company in the control room, and me down the corridor in the drum room. Using the Ram, we can all have the mix we want in the cans, and since we're going through the desk anyway, we just record rough demos on the cassette (a Technics M245X) as we go."

Listening back to the tapes allows the band to build up an idea of how they'd like each song to go, and from there, it is but a short step to an eight-track recording. Stereo imaging is checked on a small pair of Akai 'bookshelf' monitors above the keyboard stack, but the finished product is listened to through a massive pair of Tannoy cabs, loaded with 15" dual concentrics. Mark is the first to admit that, driven by his 65 W/per channel Technics amp, the set-up is over powered for the small room — 'the sound does bounce around a bit' — and with the studio gear off to one side, he relies upon the comments of the other two members, ideally-placed on a settee in the middle of the room, at mixdown. Whatever the problems, the results are good — a very clean, professional recording style which does capture the feeling of a real band playing live...

According to Bruce, the music itself has at various times been described as sounding like The Beatles, The Monkees, Foreigner, and Ultravox.

Indeed, where many artists try to fit a particular musical niche. Exit actively enjoy an eclectic approach to their sound, and this has dictated not only their working methods, but also the equipment they use. Guitarist Baz drew on two years' experience working in a local music shop when he bought his gear. The guitar is a cheap Hohner:

"A lot of rubbish is talked about the 'feel of a Fender' or whatever — basically, it's only six strings over a pickup!"

Or in Baz's case, pickups: "I've got twin coils and a coil tap for single or double coil sounds — ie your Fender or Les Paul sound — all the rest comes from the amp. I think these days you have to consider guitar and amp as a single instrument."

Baz uses a 150 watt Carlsbro Stingray Pro. It's switchable twin channels, and extensive on board effects — chorus, sustain, distortion, and reverb, all controllable from a single footswitch unit — give him all the flexibility and power he needs, and cuts out 'the millions of noisy outboard effects' once used to achieve the same result. The amp drives two 10" Wems, loaded into a compact, home-made cab built by Baz himself: "I like the middly, punchy sound of ten-inchers; they're rated at 300 watts, so I never run out of headroom."

Recording of the guitar is usually a matter of miking up the cab, to Baz's delight, and Mark's despair: "DI'ing loses that speaker distortion, which really adds something... At first, we had level problems but now Mark uses a Fostex compressor on it, and I can thrash away all I like."

The Fostex also saw brief action, alongside a Vestafire RV2 dual spring reverb, in an attempt at that classic gated-reverb drum sound, but Bruce and Mark quickly discovered each unit's limitations. The reverb 'great for vocals', began boinging on drums, and the compressor just didn't seem fast enough to keep the edge in the sound — though Mark still wonders whether it was because he was doing something wrong...

Also finding little employment these days is the band's Ibanez Harmoniser/DDL, shelved in favour of current flavour of the month, an Alesis Digital Reverb. Mark explains: "It's partly a matter of what you hear on the radio, and partly a matter of getting fed up with certain sounds — I don't hear much echo these days, but I do hear tons of reverb."

At first the temptation was to smother everything in reverb — massive snares, even at one stage recording an entire track one drum at a time — but they quickly realised that the effect was getting lost in the mix, and as Mark puts it: "The more we use it, the less we use it... it's no longer there for it's own sake, but to enhance the song."

Exit, a real band who still remember songs. Perhaps there's hope for home recording yet.