Recording drums today

[Bob Womack]

Recording drums for an alt-folk piece for a soundtrack this morning:

I chose to record in the live room that also serves as a lobby for my suite. It is about thirty feet long by eight feet wide with no parallel walls and a ramp up onto the floated floor where the drums were situated. It is equipped with full audio and video patching via a wall-mounted panel hidden in a cupboard near the middle of the long wall. I was going for that self conscious quasi-lo-fi drum thang that alt-country loves so I scaled back the hi-end by choice of mics:

Kick: Audix D6. I started with an RE-20 but it was too "cardboardy" sounding
Snare: Shure SM57 pointed across the top, Shure SM81 on the side. After years of handing off projects to other studios I got tired of dealing with the inverse phase issue on the bottom mic so I came up with a novel solution: I place the "bottom" mic on the side, pointed the same direction as the top mic but placed at the edge of the rim. The result is phase coherence and a smoother bottom mic sound without much of the razzy crap that usually comes off the snares. Pull up the two faders equally and there's your sound.
Toms: Sennheiser MD421s. Used for years for this task, they've been bypassed by smaller, brighter mics. We've got a bunch of them and MD441s and I chose the darker 421 for this project.
Hat: Shure SM81
Overheads: Mojave MA-201fet. They and nice and smooth and have a round top end. I used the "three-stick" method for placement: take a drum stick and measure off three stick lengths between the snare and each overhead for phase coherence.

Today the kit came out sounding great. Once we got the track recorded I placed expanders across the snare mics to tighten up a little ring. There was some in-phase bleed from the snare into the overheads so I used a plugin called F6 to minimize it. F6 is a dynamic parametric EQ that allows you to choose a center frequency and Q and then notch it out only when there is information at the designated frequency. I fiddled a little with "Smack Attack" plug-in on the toms but they really sounded great without.

I've exported the individual drum tracks and handed them over to a colleague who is really experienced with using Pro Tools' Beat Detective. He'll be analyzing the tracks and tightening up the timing a bit.

I laid down the bass and acoustic guitars for this song a few weeks ago and will be returning to them next week to add electric guitars and violin. The vocalista will be flying in for her dubs sometime in July and we'll also add BGVs.

I've got to mention the mic stands. We recently laid in a stock of my favorite K&M boom stands for this room. I've got to say that I love how robust they are. A tad heavy, but robust!

Bob

[Gordon Currie]

I just finished a project using Mojave MA-100s for acoustic guitar - wow. They make excellent mikes. I only wish it was still in production! I imagine the MA-200 is stellar as well.

Agree about K+M. I'll never use anything else (if I have a choice). I have some boom stands from 30 years ago that are a little road worn, but still work perfectly. Ahhh, German engineering...

[pieterh]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

Recording drums for an alt-folk piece for a soundtrack this morning:

I chose to record in the live room that also serves as a lobby for my suite. It is about thirty feet long by eight feet wide with no parallel walls and a ramp up onto the floated floor where the drums were situated. It is equipped with full audio and video patching via a wall-mounted panel hidden in a cupboard near the middle of the long wall. I was going for that self conscious quasi-lo-fi drum thang that alt-country loves so I scaled back the hi-end by choice of mics:

Kick: Audix D6. I started with an RE-20 but it was too "cardboardy" sounding
Snare: Shure SM57 pointed across the top, Shure SM81 on the side. After years of handing off projects to other studios I got tired of dealing with the inverse phase issue on the bottom mic so I came up with a novel solution: I place the "bottom" mic on the side, pointed the same direction as the top mic but placed at the edge of the rim. The result is phase coherence and a smoother bottom mic sound without much of the razzy crap that usually comes off the snares. Pull up the two faders equally and there's your sound.
Toms: Sennheiser MD421s. Used for years for this task, they've been bypassed by smaller, brighter mics. We've got a bunch of them and MD441s and I chose the darker 421 for this project.
Hat: Shure SM81
Overheads: Mojave MA-201fet. They and nice and smooth and have a round top end. I used the "three-stick" method for placement: take a drum stick and measure off three stick lengths between the snare and each overhead for phase coherence.

Today the kit came out sounding great. Once we got the track recorded I placed expanders across the snare mics to tighten up a little ring. There was some in-phase bleed from the snare into the overheads so I used a plugin called F6 to minimize it. F6 is a dynamic parametric EQ that allows you to choose a center frequency and Q and then notch it out only when there is information at the designated frequency. I fiddled a little with "Smack Attack" plug-in on the toms but they really sounded great without.

I've exported the individual drum tracks and handed them over to a colleague who is really experienced with using Pro Tools' Beat Detective. He'll be analyzing the tracks and tightening up the timing a bit.

I laid down the bass and acoustic guitars for this song a few weeks ago and will be returning to them next week to add electric guitars and violin. The vocalista will be flying in for her dubs sometime in July and we'll also add BGVs.

I've got to mention the mic stands. We recently laid in a stock of my favorite K&M boom stands for this room. I've got to say that I love how robust they are. A tad heavy, but robust!

Bob

The SM81 is a great mic.

I agree re K&M. We don’t use anything else at the theatre where I work: they have an amazing range of accessories such as mic booms you can attach to stage metalwork or scenery for example, iPad holders, drinks holders (really!) etc.

Best of all, if bits wear out or get lost you can usually just order the replacement parts rather than be left with a useless piece of metal.

MD421 is a great electric guitar amp mic too though I’ve taken to using the Sennheiser e906 on small stages mainly to save space but they sound great too.

Interesting tip regarding the “bottom” snare mic. To be honest I rarely use two mics live but next time I do I will try this! By the way, have you ever tried miking the hi hat from underneath (and flipping the polarity)? I get some great results that way.

[Bob Womack]

Originally Posted by pieterh

By the way, have you ever tried miking the hi hat from underneath (and flipping the polarity)? I get some great results that way.

I've never done it but it surely makes sense. I tend to go out to the edge because I want to avoid the "slush" and get more sizzle but I can't think of a reason going underneath wouldn't work.

Bob

[Brent Hahn]

Not counting the hole in the res head, that setup is a total 70's flashback. Takes me back almost further than I go. :-)

You're going to post the finished song, right?

[Bob Womack]

Originally Posted by Brent Hahn

You're going to post the finished song, right?

It's a client's work for a sound track on a video that won't come out for months. They typically prefer we not share the stuff, which is sad because I've got some great guitar work buried in these projects.

Bob

[Brent Hahn]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

They typically prefer we not share the stuff...

In that case, next time, please take a couple minutes and bang them drums so you've got something you can post. It'd be very educational for folks who don't regularly do drums to be able to see and hear how a pro setup works.

When it comes to recording, especially beyond the scope of acoustic guitar and voice, you're one of the bigger fish on this forum. When you share your knowledge, I think folks here really appreciate it, but pix with no sound is just a tease, y'know?

[Bob Womack]

Alright, if you twist my arm. This is just an early mix minus vocals demo. I've started building the drum reverbs. We'll be overdubbing violin and electric guitar soon. The drums haven't been run through "Beat Detective" yet to true them up. When that happens I'll probaby have to re-record the acoustic guitars as well in order to get the on-time with the drums.

DEMO

Bob

[Johnny K]

Nice! Whats is the spec on the kit?

[Bob Womack]

Kick and toms are Aquarian which is supposedly the entry-level brand from DW. The kick is quite deep. The snare is a brand-new Ludwig Supra Chrome 7" deep, supposedly the most-recorded snare in history. The cymbals are all Zildjian. Does that help?

Bob

[Brent Hahn]

Nice recording -- works well. Thanks for posting that.

[Johnny K]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

Kick and toms are Aquarian which is supposedly the entry-level brand from DW. The kick is quite deep. The snare is a brand-new Ludwig Supra Chrome 7" deep, supposedly the most-recorded snare in history. The cymbals are all Zildjian. Does that help?

Bob

Yes

My next snare purchase is likely gonna be a Supraphonic. They are very inexpensive. And they sound good

[Bob Womack]

Yesterday and today were violin and electric guitar days, as well as Beat Detective day, at the studio. Don't really have any actions shots but I do have a demo. The violinist was from the regional symphony and a real pro. She not only had the music down before she came through the door, but she also gently helped with scoring errors by making suggestions. Being that the composer is just short of 3,000 miles away and wasn't present or connected to the session, it helped make things run along swiftly. I mic'd her with a single Neumann TLM-170 set two-and-a-half feet above the soundboard, slightly in front, and on axis. If you've got a decent room, the distance from the instrument takes away the brashness of the bow nicely.

Act two was adding the electric guitar, which I played. I brought in the Gibson SG and my Line6 HD500X that I've tweaked with my special sauce.The SG i s a '61 Reissue with Gibson '59 Classic and'59 Classic Plus pickups. My intention was originally to use it for all the electric guitar partsbut once I had them in place I came to the conclusion that the "grunt" offered by a Les Paul was needed for the "voluntaries" in the song.

So today I brought in the '74 Gibson Les Paul Standard I've played for forty-one years and played just the voluntaries. Its girth made all the difference in the world. That guitar is part of a pretty small run of "Standard" LPs made in Kalamazoo between '73 and '75, before the official "Standard" model was made the flagship guitar of the Nashville plant.

Once I had the guitar parts in the bag it was time to import the drums parts I'd handed over to a colleague to pull into time. When we pulled them in and lined them up we got a couple of surprises: one, they didn't line up with the first beat. Not a problem. I cut off the head and lined up the first beat with the measure mark in the DAW. Then we discovered problem two: The software mapped the apparent tempo of the song from the drum tracks and adjusted the tempo to their variances. As a result, as the song played through the drum track wandered. Thank goodness it only wandered in the macro, as in every couple of measures. Within measures it stayed true. I had to chop all eight tracks every few measures and edit it back into true. I surmise that the software expects you to time-adjust ALL the tracks, and we didn't. Still and all, it was an improvement on the original tracks where the drummer varied within measures.

With that done it was time to generate a rough mix for the clients to hear and approve. And wouldn't you know it: this afternoon, the moment I sat back, reasonably satisfied, they walked through the door for a demo. By way of explanation, at the beginning of the project they brought me demo tracks of the voice, a synth track of the violin, and the little guitar arpeggio figure and asked me to arrange the rest of the project. Today after listening through, they asked for a couple of level adjustments but loved the product, so I'm tickled pink.

In a couple of months we'll bring in the vocalista/composer and a small group of background singers and record the vocals for this song.

So, here is the progress so far: SONG MINUS VOCALS

Bob

[muscmp]

pretty cool, bob. sounds rather irish oriented to me, but will have to hear the vocal aspect later.

play music!