Chiba
08-24-2004, 11:24 AM
You guys recall I was running around the 'drum issue' for my wife's album a while ago.
Last week: solution.
I set things up with my buddy down in Raleigh to get his drummer to play the tracks and to record in their studio. I've been sending them demos since early July and last week I went down to take a stab at it.
I figured at the very worst, I'd gain some experience and even if I came away with no useable drum tracks, I'd have learned something. After all, I had never miked a drum kit by myself...well, not for a critical application like recording. I've seen it done, asked a lot of questions, but never been solo on the task.
My buddy was a little help - but he kept saying he was learning from me, not sure if he was being nice or honest.
Their studio is really, really cool. They built it out in an unfinished basement - live room, control room, iso booth, storage closet, and 'lounge'. They went with a full Pro Tools TDM setup with the accompanying DigiDesign console. They're working on building up their hardware/outboard gear now, having spent a lot of money on the startup rig.
The first night we spent about 4 hours miking up the kit and tweaking things to eliminate 'bad' ring, tuning issues, creaks & rattles, and get the best sounds we could. They don't have any EQ's, compressors, preamps (except what's in the console), or anything like that, so we were 100% reliant on mic choice and mic placement for our sounds.
I wanted a thumpy, open, somewhat woody sound overall on the drums. My wife's stuff is very folky, very folk-rocky, and will have LOTS of acoustic guitars and piano when it's done, so I wanted the drums to fit as best as they could without sounding too 'hard'.
After choosing between 2 different snares and a few different cymbals, we started miking. Here's what we ended up using:
Bass: AKG D112
Snare: SM57 on top, another SM57 on the bottom
3 Toms: Sennheiser 421 (recent ones)
Overheads: Shure SM81 x2
Room: BLUE Baby Bottle
Aux (Ride & Chimes): BLUE Ball
I can't recall what we used on the hi-hat, but it was a small condenser with a ring below the capsule that engaged a -10dB pad and required phantom power.
We pretty much had to use two mics on the snare because the way the drummer sets up his kit, there's really no 'good' way to mic the top head, so our top mic was aimed across the head instead of at it; miking the bottom head gave us a lot of the 'snap' and high end that we couldn't get from the top, but blending the two sounds together in various proportions is enabling me to fine-tune the overall snare sound for each song, even to the point where I can crisp up the snare for the chorus and back off the high-end again for the verse simply by tweaking a fader instead of getting all involved with a bunch of EQing.* The upside of the top mic being aimed across the head was a really great rimshot tone that sounds great on a couple songs.
The toms took *forever* to mic up - probably a good hour or so just moving the mics a half-inch this way, a quarter-inch that way, just to get the sounds as perfect as we could. We miked the bass drum to cut down a bit on the 'click' of the beater and emphasize the space a little more while still maintaining a good amount of the attack.
Using the (recently repaired) Baby Bottle as the room mic was, I must say, somewhat of a brilliant move on my part (it was my idea) as it's allowing me to fine-tune the extreme high-end crispness of the snare, ride, crashes, and hi-hat - PLUS it lets me add in natural reverb (that room sound) without using a bunch of plugins across the whole kit. The proportion of overheads to room in the mix is really fun to work with.
In the end, the thing that matters most is that my wife is really pleased with how her songs are coming. We did some things drum-wise that she wasn't expecting (for example, doing a very march-y snare drum thing on one song).
I learned a lot, and feel like I did a good job on the drums. The drummer was great to work with - even with all the work we did on 'just sounds' the first night, we still managed to get 2 tunes recorded that night, and finished everything else up (9 more songs) over the next 2 nights. Probably 20-24 hours of work overall.
So - everybody that gave advice in the past on miking drums - thanks! I internalized as much as I could and was able to do a good job.
...now I just have to record everything else :D
--chiba
*By the way, I came across a 'Recording' magazine *after* I was done (naturally) that had a bunch of articles on miking up a drum kit. They recommended - insisted, actually - that when you mic both the top and bottom heads of a snare drum, you MUST reverse the phase of one mic. I did not do this, yet I'm still incredibly pleased with the snare sounds we got. Why this insistence? And if it's so important to reverse the phase, why did I still get a good sound without doing it?
Last week: solution.
I set things up with my buddy down in Raleigh to get his drummer to play the tracks and to record in their studio. I've been sending them demos since early July and last week I went down to take a stab at it.
I figured at the very worst, I'd gain some experience and even if I came away with no useable drum tracks, I'd have learned something. After all, I had never miked a drum kit by myself...well, not for a critical application like recording. I've seen it done, asked a lot of questions, but never been solo on the task.
My buddy was a little help - but he kept saying he was learning from me, not sure if he was being nice or honest.
Their studio is really, really cool. They built it out in an unfinished basement - live room, control room, iso booth, storage closet, and 'lounge'. They went with a full Pro Tools TDM setup with the accompanying DigiDesign console. They're working on building up their hardware/outboard gear now, having spent a lot of money on the startup rig.
The first night we spent about 4 hours miking up the kit and tweaking things to eliminate 'bad' ring, tuning issues, creaks & rattles, and get the best sounds we could. They don't have any EQ's, compressors, preamps (except what's in the console), or anything like that, so we were 100% reliant on mic choice and mic placement for our sounds.
I wanted a thumpy, open, somewhat woody sound overall on the drums. My wife's stuff is very folky, very folk-rocky, and will have LOTS of acoustic guitars and piano when it's done, so I wanted the drums to fit as best as they could without sounding too 'hard'.
After choosing between 2 different snares and a few different cymbals, we started miking. Here's what we ended up using:
Bass: AKG D112
Snare: SM57 on top, another SM57 on the bottom
3 Toms: Sennheiser 421 (recent ones)
Overheads: Shure SM81 x2
Room: BLUE Baby Bottle
Aux (Ride & Chimes): BLUE Ball
I can't recall what we used on the hi-hat, but it was a small condenser with a ring below the capsule that engaged a -10dB pad and required phantom power.
We pretty much had to use two mics on the snare because the way the drummer sets up his kit, there's really no 'good' way to mic the top head, so our top mic was aimed across the head instead of at it; miking the bottom head gave us a lot of the 'snap' and high end that we couldn't get from the top, but blending the two sounds together in various proportions is enabling me to fine-tune the overall snare sound for each song, even to the point where I can crisp up the snare for the chorus and back off the high-end again for the verse simply by tweaking a fader instead of getting all involved with a bunch of EQing.* The upside of the top mic being aimed across the head was a really great rimshot tone that sounds great on a couple songs.
The toms took *forever* to mic up - probably a good hour or so just moving the mics a half-inch this way, a quarter-inch that way, just to get the sounds as perfect as we could. We miked the bass drum to cut down a bit on the 'click' of the beater and emphasize the space a little more while still maintaining a good amount of the attack.
Using the (recently repaired) Baby Bottle as the room mic was, I must say, somewhat of a brilliant move on my part (it was my idea) as it's allowing me to fine-tune the extreme high-end crispness of the snare, ride, crashes, and hi-hat - PLUS it lets me add in natural reverb (that room sound) without using a bunch of plugins across the whole kit. The proportion of overheads to room in the mix is really fun to work with.
In the end, the thing that matters most is that my wife is really pleased with how her songs are coming. We did some things drum-wise that she wasn't expecting (for example, doing a very march-y snare drum thing on one song).
I learned a lot, and feel like I did a good job on the drums. The drummer was great to work with - even with all the work we did on 'just sounds' the first night, we still managed to get 2 tunes recorded that night, and finished everything else up (9 more songs) over the next 2 nights. Probably 20-24 hours of work overall.
So - everybody that gave advice in the past on miking drums - thanks! I internalized as much as I could and was able to do a good job.
...now I just have to record everything else :D
--chiba
*By the way, I came across a 'Recording' magazine *after* I was done (naturally) that had a bunch of articles on miking up a drum kit. They recommended - insisted, actually - that when you mic both the top and bottom heads of a snare drum, you MUST reverse the phase of one mic. I did not do this, yet I'm still incredibly pleased with the snare sounds we got. Why this insistence? And if it's so important to reverse the phase, why did I still get a good sound without doing it?