New in stock at Sweetwater Sound: After a very successful, and public, beta test campaign Sonic Foundry’s new Vegas Pro software is now complete and in stock for sale. The $699 retail program has all the features you’d expect in a professional multitrack software environment, but it is also remarkably easy to understand and use. They have downloadable demo versions available at their Web site.
Unless we receive more responses over the weekend, today will be the last installment of our Drum Recording Summit. We thank you all for your excellent submissions and we hope everyone finds one or two tricks that work for them.
Brian Miller
Mystery Music
Langley, B.C. Canada
Okay, first things first – you must have a decent set to work with. To follow a tried and true expression, “garbage in, garbage out” what is needed firstly is a good instrument and secondly a good signal path.
I like to use condensers all around the kit, if budget allows for it. If you do use condensers, placement is a big issue, as it will capture so much of that plastic meets wood sound (head to stick contact) if you don’t position the mic well (unless you’re going for that effect). If the budget cannot afford, say, 8 condenser mics, then I would recommend some good dynamic hypercardioid mics for close miking the drums, and a couple of cardioid condensers overhead for stereo placement.
For mic placement, spend the most time on the overheads. There are two stereo mic placements that I really like – the XY coincident pair, and the ORTF method – placed a few feet above the cymbals. Though they don’t make a wide stereo spread, they cover the kit well, with minimal phasing problems. If space allows for it, put the overheads up higher, but the distance from the kit should be less than the distance from the ceiling in order to have less reflected sound. For the toms, I like to place the mics almost perpendicular to the plane of the tom head. This placement gets less stick sound, and more resonance and phat low end. The kick and the snare are worthy of the most setup time and there are numerous placements to consider, especially on the kick. Miking from a distance captures more low end, but doesn’t sound as tight as close up. If you have an extra mic available, put one up close, and one distant (about 6 feet or greater, depending on room size).
Room acoustics note: curtains and thin foam do nothing for the low end. They do, however, take out the great sheen of the cymbals! Invest in thick fiberglass wool. It is a good absorber throughout the sound spectrum. Keep it live enough, just use absorption where its needed.
For a monitor mix, it depends on the situation. If the players are live on the floor, I might be inclined to put straight vocals and click track in there. The vocals helps to give definition to song structure, while the click keeps it in time. However, if there is a guitar with digital delay (a la U2), I would take out the click and crank that guitar. Keep the vocals in there. In a non-live situation, get that click in there, and any scratch tracks available. Don’t bother sticking the drums in there, drummers deserve to keep their ears, too!
I think the key to getting the drummer’s best performance is to keep him relaxed. Try to have the setup time be minimal. Use your own tried and tested methods, if it’s quick. Get the sound check done, and get going. Don’t spend your time on guitars and vocals and accessories, they can be done in the overdub stage.
Mark Hingsbergen
“The Catacombs”
Ideally I’d prefer to record a great set of drums in a 25’x35′ room with vaulted ceilings, wave traps, diffusers, and a nice hardwood floor with a few throw rugs. But the reality is that my studio is my basement and “standard” techniques don’t work well.
The problem with a finished basement is the early reflections from the low ceiling and the nearby walls. These early reflections are the psychoacoustic “clue” to the listener’s ears that you didn’t use the ideal room described above. What I do is to first minimize early reflections, then work on simulating the liveliness of the “perfect room”.
To eliminate ceiling reflections I have installed a pair of panels, approx. 2’x5′ each, above the drum kit in a shallow V shape to angle reflections away from the kit. I treated the surface with convoluted foam to provide additional absorption. Plush carpet helps the floor a bit, then for the walls I use bookshelves (stuffed with my kids’ toys and books) for diffusion and I hang ordinary bedding comforters from hooks around the perimeter as needed to knock down the “flutter” echo typical in small rooms.
This all works well except for the fact that in a confined space, a professional snare drum is going to dominate virtually every overhead mike and a live kick drum is not far behind it in volume. I have noticed from doing live recordings of my band that the same kit with the same mikes in a bigger room “breathes” and separates more, but in the small room there is just no way to get the snare off the overheads without trying something funky with phase cancellation. So my drummer and I have come up with a hybrid triggering approach that retains nearly all the feel of a real snare and kick, yet gives me incredible amounts of isolation and flexibility. The Roland V-drum snare is nearly silent, and it provides wonderful expressiveness (the TD10 converts stick placement information into controller 16 expression!). Similarly, the kick trigger is nearly silent as well. (I suppose if a better kick drum feel were needed, one could purchase the new Roland adapter, which allows a mesh head trigger to be used as a kick drum.)
Instead of using an audio track for the kick and snare, I send the trigger signals back to the control room and use them to trigger the TD10 head unit. I then sequence the MIDI output and save a copy of the “raw” kick-snare performance. If needed, I can nudge the timing a bit, and I have total flexibility on drum sound choice at mixdown. Further, with no kick and snare in the room I can saturate the tape a lot better with cymbals and toms.
For the live drums, I prefer the following: Toms – SM57 Nice and bright, good isolation capability. Overhead cymbals – have been using a pair of TOA KYs but am eager to try my new Oktava MC012s. Hi-hat – CAD E-300. Snare (when needed) – SM57, Sennheiser 421, or AKG D1000E. Kick (when needed) – Sennheiser 421.
I usually set up my best possible sound with an x-y overhead pair, then spot mike the ride, the hats, and any other specialty cymbals. Other times I will use a left, right, and center configuration. When spot miking a cymbal I usually aim at the center so rocking does not alter the timbre, but off-axis to avoid the low end fundamental. I also roll off the low end even before printing so I’m not saturating the tape with a lot of useless low end. I prefer to mike all toms from the top near the edge, aimed about halfway between the center and the edge.
To mix, I start with kick and snare, then add in the overheads to get the most prominent cymbals to the right volume. Then I’ll add in the individual toms and spot cymbals (as well as hats) to flesh out the rest of the kit.
At mixdown, I will often use a combination of small room and large room programs. The small room gets me back to that “ideal” recording space (more or less) and the large room program gets me the rest of the way, whether I am after an arena or a club sound.
This hybrid approach to drum tracking has given me excellent results, and I recommend it to anyone recording at home.