Cheddatom's Recording

[cheddatom]

I thought i'd make a topic to stick stuff in. Hopefully i'll get some advice and learn some more about recording. I've attached something I did the other day - this is just a bass thing I was doing for a bit of fun, but I recorded drums onto it to practise my drum sounds. I reckon this one sounds OK. The toms are lacking real body, which I could do with some help with. They're close mic'd with Red Audio clip ons.

(no criticism on the crap drumming thanks, just the sound )

[51m0n]

Drums sound waaaaaaay back in the room (esp the snare) to my ears.

Is that just room mics?

The toms will need some judicious eq and maybe a bit opf parallel compression, hard to say without having the tracks to play with though!

[cheddatom]

I put a pair of mics at the back of the room for this, as well as some close overheads. I liked it, is it 80s and cheesey?!? I was going for "spacious" rather than "sickly". I do have the snare close mic'd but it's not that high in the mix.

My toms tend to rumble a lot with the kicks, so there's quite a lot of low taken out with EQ, then I have a bit of compression and a touch of extra attack with the stilwell transient monster. They still sound sh*t though. Should I try micing the bottom instead of the top?

[51m0n]

[quote name='cheddatom' post='972742' date='Sep 30 2010, 02:32 PM']I put a pair of mics at the back of the room for this, as well as some close overheads. I liked it, is it 80s and cheesey?!? I was going for "spacious" rather than "sickly". I do have the snare close mic'd but it's not that high in the mix.

My toms tend to rumble a lot with the kicks, so there's quite a lot of low taken out with EQ, then I have a bit of compression and a touch of extra attack with the stilwell transient monster. They still sound sh*t though. Should I try micing the bottom instead of the top?[/quote]

mic the tops of the toms yes!!!! Mic similar to a snare, although I've had good results pointing straigth at the skin about 2" inside the rim too.The bleed will kill you if you dont, guess you already found that out!

If you cant get it with that, then how old are those heads?

I would have a taken the close miced snare and parallel compressed it to really really grab the attack (and kill everything else) then pull that up drier in the mix.

It is a tad too reverby for my loking, but thats a taste thing isnt it - its not 'wrong'...

[cheddatom]

Sorry, I said I was micing the tops of the toms, should I be micing the bottom instead? Or maybe as well?

I do have a bit of parallel comp on the whole drum mix, but maybe I should send more of the snare to that.

The reason I love the room mics so much is that they transformed my kick drum sound. Maybe I can try carving some of the frequency bands that I don't need out, reducing the reverb effect? I think it's low mids where they added an extra punch that I just wasn't getting from the close kick mic.

[51m0n]

[quote name='cheddatom' post='972788' date='Sep 30 2010, 03:14 PM']Sorry, I said I was micing the tops of the toms, should I be micing the bottom instead? Or maybe as well?

I do have a bit of parallel comp on the whole drum mix, but maybe I should send more of the snare to that.

The reason I love the room mics so much is that they transformed my kick drum sound. Maybe I can try carving some of the frequency bands that I don't need out, reducing the reverb effect? I think it's low mids where they added an extra punch that I just wasn't getting from the close kick mic.[/quote]

Sorry, misread your post (doh!)

You should be micing the top of the toms

However if you are getting a lot of kick spill you can review the direction the tom mics are pointing try to make the most of their cardiodness. Simply put if you can get the diaphram to point in such a direction that it is perpendicular to the kick whilst still pointing at the sweet spot of the tom it should help some.

Room mics are great (dont get me wrong) but that snare is a mile away from the kick, in a different universe even

I find with kick micing that position is ultra critical. Move the mic a couple of inches and that low mid might just come back!

Another good trick is to time align you overheads with the snare and kick in your DAW (that is line up the transients so they are all at EXACTLY the same point in time) it makes every drum kit sound much much bigger IME. You want the mick transient in the kick mic track to happen at precisely the same time as the the kick transient in the overheads (and track snare if possible), at the same time the snare transients need to line up wiht the overhead transientts too. Its usually a fair few samples out.

[cheddatom]

The rumble i'm on about on the toms is more the actual toms resonating, rather than spill. The mics on the toms are pointing almost directly down to the skin. The toms sound great in real life. Maybe it's the amount of low cut i'm using on them. I'll play with that later.

So, maybe I should bring my room mics a bit closer to the kit, and play with my kick drum sound a bit more. I'm using the Red Audio kick mic, do you reckon I should be getting a real punchy kick sound from just the close mic? If so then that would negate the "need" for the room mics to be so high up.

I did get a tape measure out to get the overheads equi-distant from the kick and snare. I've never tried time aligning within the DAW before, although i've read about it.

Thanks for all the tips - plenty to play with from just one poster

[51m0n]

[quote name='cheddatom' post='972905' date='Sep 30 2010, 04:47 PM']The rumble i'm on about on the toms is more the actual toms resonating, rather than spill. The mics on the toms are pointing almost directly down to the skin. The toms sound great in real life. Maybe it's the amount of low cut i'm using on them. I'll play with that later.

So, maybe I should bring my room mics a bit closer to the kit, and play with my kick drum sound a bit more. I'm using the Red Audio kick mic, do you reckon I should be getting a real punchy kick sound from just the close mic? If so then that would negate the "need" for the room mics to be so high up.

I did get a tape measure out to get the overheads equi-distant from the kick and snare. I've never tried time aligning within the DAW before, although i've read about it.

Thanks for all the tips - plenty to play with from just one poster [/quote]

If the toms are resonating with the kick then it s a kit tuning issue.

In all likelihood your kick drum can be tuned a lot lower than it currently is.

I've used the techniques for tuning that this guy suggests really successfully on several different kits, and never had toms resonate too much with the kick:-

This one is really really good:-






Really not trying to teach grandma to suck eggs, but I was shown a couple of ways to tune drums by various drum folk (with years of experience) and all of their methods were less successful and harder than this guy's explainations IME.

[51m0n]

Theres no reason you shouldnt be able to get a fantastic sound from that mic on a properly tuned kick drum, but you will need to experiment with tuning the drum, dampening it, and mic position.

It may seem like a lot of effort, but IME getting the drum sound absolutely as good as it can be first, then getting the mic position absolutely bang on makes more difference than any number of mics and preamps and effects later on.

The only other drum sound influencer in the same league is the room itself - but that really effects the room mics and overheads more than the kit itself...

Edited September 30, 2010 by 51m0n

[cheddatom]

I just watched the drum tuning videos. Thanks very much! That's very informative. I don't have the back skin for my kick drum, but I don't think that should matter too much. I'll try and tune it. I did tune it up a couple of weeks ago because it felt too slack, but that's probably just my crap kick technique (and horrendous kick pedal).

Would you suggest damping the toms at all? I've been to studios where they do that, but they sound so good I don't want to kill it.

I'm suppose to start the new creep joint album ASAP but i'm going to wait until I have the best drum sound possible, because I think it kind of ruins the last one.

[51m0n]

[quote name='cheddatom' post='973011' date='Sep 30 2010, 06:10 PM']I just watched the drum tuning videos. Thanks very much! That's very informative. I don't have the back skin for my kick drum, but I don't think that should matter too much. I'll try and tune it. I did tune it up a couple of weeks ago because it felt too slack, but that's probably just my crap kick technique (and horrendous kick pedal).

Would you suggest damping the toms at all? I've been to studios where they do that, but they sound so good I don't want to kill it.

I'm suppose to start the new creep joint album ASAP but i'm going to wait until I have the best drum sound possible, because I think it kind of ruins the last one.[/quote]

No worries, I found them completely enlightening!

A friend of mine recently bought a really nice fusion kit but was fretting that the kick wouldnt go low enough, we tuned it up following this exact technique and it was monstrous, hugely deep and full sounding - fantastic!

You can damp the toms, but only a tiny amount or they sound like 70's cardboard boxes. Another drummer friend of mine likes to make dampening rings for his toms out of old skins. He initially cuts out the skin then cuts progressively larger holes in the middle until he gets exactly the right amount of dampening. Works really well for close micing!

A small piece of bluetack on the snare skin about 1/2" from the rim can do wonders for the snare, experiment with the size of the piece, but do make sure its properly stuck!

A resonant head on a kick is not really necessary for recording. In fact you can really improve the sound with a second mic if you build a drum tunnel off the front of the kick drum with some really heavy blankets and mic at least 3 times further away than the close mic (which would be really aimed at getting the click off the beater in this case) at the far end of the tunnel.

The tunnel is there to give as much isolation from the rest of the kit as possible, and to allow the sound of the entire kick drum to be miced (not just a spot on the batter head)

Looks a bit lik this:-



You can get really nice results with this trick!

[ShergoldSnickers]

Really like what you are doing there Tom. The general feel and atmosphere - right up my street. Yeah we know the timing is a bit dodgy, but you asked us not to comment on that. So.... the drum sound....

I'd try to get the best possible natural overhead sound first and then use reinforcement from other mics as little as possible, and with as few mics as possible. I usually end up with a Rode NT4 stereo for the overhead - in reasonably close, a CAD m179 in figure of eight to catch the snare and hi-hat, with a lobe for each, and then a kick drum mic. Mind you I'm very fortunate that the drummer in the band has a kit that records especially well, the toms project and don't need additional mics. You get a reasonable stereo image of a kit that sounds natural - a good starting point. Having said all that I'd willingly throw all that away if a better method came along, there's no room for dogma, and I'll freely admit my experience in recording lots of different kits is very limited. Always willing to learn.

[cheddatom]

Yo SS - yes, plenty of out of time drum hits I'm not a great player, and this was after and hour of trying to get a very technical rock song down, but I don't need excuses, i'm not really a drummer.

It's interesting what you say about the toms projecting. I did a demo of a new band i'm in, which is chilled out sort-of-hip-hop. We all played live in the room together, just like a practise, and I was limited for channels and so had no close mics on the toms. The overheads were the main drum sound, and with some compression they sounded great. The toms really cut through in this mix, even though I did nothing to specifically address them.

This room is quite big, and the reverb you get when playing drums is pretty big. I love that sound when we're in the room, so I want to try and capture that. My stereo pair at the back of the room seemed to do that pretty well, however, like 5imon says, the snare does sound quite far back. So, maybe i'll try to carve the snare out of the room mics a bit.

I do have a pair of overheads quite close, and these give a nice overall sound but very dry.

I have a load of matresses in the garage, I might get these out to construct a kick drum tunnel.

[51m0n]

Cheddatom let me grab the stems of this off him to have a crack at a mix.

Anyways, heres my wee effort done on cans. Its a VERY different approach to the drums from Cheddatom's, far more close mic'ed and compressed to 'pop' more.

If anyone is interested I could waffle on a bit about how I got this far, I sent Cheddatom the project file so he could see for himself.

Edited October 5, 2010 by 51m0n

[cheddatom]

51mon's been giving me loads of help. I've still not had a look at the session file he's sent me, but lessons learned so far:

Record in 24bit for more headroom
Check you have all your input gain set correctly before recording
Tune drums properly
Mix better

I've always recorded in 16bit and always struggled for headroom on my inputs, and never connected the two. Hopefully this will make setting the gain for each mic channel easier.

Also, does anyone else have the M-Audio Delta cards? I'm really confused as to how to set the input gain "consumer, +4db, -10db" are the options. Anyway, I played about and got the setting which seems to give the most headroom. I think it's "+4db" - is that right? And have you used the internal pre-amps on a Delta 1010LT? Are they sh*t or is it just me?