Recording Drums

What is your procedure for recording drums? Do you add anything on the way in, or just run dry and add later? What plugs do you use? - eq, comp, verb etc. ------------------ bassmac

I haven't recorded live drums in a while, but the drummer I use has a rack of ADATs that he records to. I send him a rough mix on ADAT (with click track), he lays down 6-7 tracks of drums, then I import the ADAT tracks into PTLE. I alway ask him not to compress or gate anything, as I want the flexibility for the mix. He uses an ART dual MP tube preamp on the kick and snare. Otherwise, everything goes through an Allen & Heath board. It's a pretty standard setup: D112 on kick 57 on snare Shure BG 4.0 for snare bottom AKG 423s as overheads SM81 on hihat 421 on two high toms 421 on each low tom (or can use the 3 421s with each high tom mic'ed) I tend to use the C1 as a frequency-specific gate for BD, toms, hat, and snare. I rarely gate the overheads, but do compress them a little (or a lot) with a C1 or CompressorBank, and use an L1 on the overall drum submix to keep things under control. I also generally use a McDSP CB1 or CB2 on both the snare and the BD (and sometimes the toms). The "drum twack" preset is wonderful. I almost always have to boost a little 60-80hz on the BD and roll everything off the snare below 100hz, although the frequency-dependent gate takes care of a lot. I often roll off everything on the overheads below 100-150hz (different people may argue with this). Usually a little top end gliss (10-12K) for the overheads and I'm done with EQ. Once I have the gates set perfectly, I'll usually run them as Audiosuite so I can save the CPU power for vocals, etc., but I'll usually keep the CompressorBanks live as RTAS for final tweaking. I'll generally get the cymbols (overheads) at the right level in the mix first, then bring in the other mics for the punch. I usually have a short ambience or small room sound set up on the drum submix to make sure the kit is cohesive after all the processing. I also always have a separate reverb send for the snare (longer decay), and usually the toms. It depends on the song and style. Oh, and another thing I started doing recently is to nudge the overheads a little forward in time (to the left) - a couple of milliseconds is all. It seems to get the overhead mics more in-phase with the rest of the kit and opens up the sound. I get a pretty good sound considering it's done at 16-bits on the ADAT (the ADATs do have upgraded A/D converters). When I get some time (and learn how to do it), I'll post some MP3s of different stuff I've done... ------------------ LW [This message has been edited by lwilliam (edited January 24, 2001).]

Anyone ever notice that when you run the drums to a stereo bus and bring then back on an Aux track that they sound a little different?? Especially the snare. I'm trying to track down what I've got going on here but should there be any audible difference when you submix the kit? Thanks, KS

Anyone ever notice that when you run the drums to a stereo bus and bring then back on an Aux track that they sound a little different?? Especially the snare. I'm trying to track down what I've got going on here but should there be any audible difference when you submix the kit? Thanks, KS

Not so much on drums to aux track but when I insert a plugin on the run. Jason

This might not have anything to do with the previous discussion although it is related, but everytime I run the snare through an aux and add sansamp to distort it a bit, when played with the original snare, it sounds like crap...as if it was phasing really bad. So I thought the plug in delay is playing tricks on me, so I printed it to another track, and tried to align it, phasewise, but I just can't seem to get it sounding right... Juergen

Thanks for the tips guys Quick question - When someone talks about submixing drums and blending it with the original drum tracks, do they mean - a) bouncing all the drum tracks including auxs to disc and importing as a stereo pair, or b) just simply busing all the drum tracks to a stereo aux channel. ------------------ bassmac