LeeRosario
New member
Drums from A-Z
By Lee Rosario
Intro
With all things being said and views always energectically exchanged, I have always believed that one of the most important elements of any song is the construction of it’s foundation. Of course, many have their own opinions and if you haven’t heard me say it already, I’ll say it again: Use your ears. So I find this contribution fitting in my “never gripe” attitude and as always, I’m just passing on some of the know. Some of it from reading, some of it from experimentation, some of it from learning from heavy hitters and some just out of stupidity. This is my version of a tutorial.
But anyway, let’s get to it…
Take it From the Top…
Before I begin, let me explain the situation...
I’ve included a link to an audio mp3 file called “Drum Tutorial”. It’s not really a tutorial, just four different evolutions of a drum take. So as they are divided on the MP3, I hope to explain my approach for each segment successively. Also, I will try to be as detailed as possible. Once you open the mp3, you’ll hear drums playing, a pause and then on to the next version. At no point where any “artifical” sound effects used on these drums. All the sounds came from the drum itself. Also, I didn’t want to go crazy on the FX since I wanted to maintain the vibe simple and to the point.
Anyway, the list goes as follows:
0:00-0:30 Tracking
0:30-1:07 Editing & Basic Mix
1:07-1:42 Mixed with FX
1:42-2:30 Final Touch
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=325247
The Gear I used…
This was done on a basic home setup for a demo recording I’m doing for a rock band (due out in April). The complete list is as follows:
-AMD dual processor PC (Windows) with three 250gig 7200rpm harddrives.
-Pro Tools LE 7 with Digi 002 rack
-Mackie VLZ/XDR mixer (12) channel
-Neutrik microphone cables
- (4) SM57s, (1) Beta 52, (1) Beta 91, (2) CM95, (1) CM90, (1) AKG C3000B
-Vintage “Norma” jazz kit
0:00-0:30 Tracking
The first step is tracking. But before we can even think about that, we have to consider a few things.
The room sets the flavor, the drums make the sound, the player behind the kit makes the impact, the sticks he uses paints his picture, the equipment to record it with and any distractions to the recording process being the lab environment. For drums, I chose to track in a home living room with a high and angled ceiling and wooden floor. No padding was availble, so we had to work in an entirely live room.
In this senario, we have a weak drummer that struggles to maintain a steady beat. For this, we will have to deal with editing the entire groove against the graph later on. Then the drum itself is not the best drum set you’ve ever seen, so massive adjustments had to be made (using your ears) to tune the drums with whatever means nessesary.
Just the right amount of muffling and tuning was applied and was needed to obtain the best sound possible.
Now in this stage, I had to deal with a few problems:
-I only had 8 tracks to work with, so I immediately had to arrange a way to group sources effectively to avoid any problems in editing. So I worked out this input setup:
Channel 1: Snare Top (SM57)
Channel 2: Snare Bot (SM57)
Channel 3: Overhead L (CM95)
Channel 4: Overhead R (CM95)
Analog 5: “Blended” Kick (Beta 91 and Beta 52 from mackie)
Analog 6: Tom Hi (SM57)
Analog 7: Tom Lo (SM57)
Analog 8: HiHat (CM90)
Once I figured that out, I had to work to my next problem, getting complete flexibility in shaping sound. I figured I could only achieve this in one of 2 ways: 1) Get great sounds on the way in, but risk having limited flexibility and thin sound or 2) sound replace my sources later on in editing.
After weighing out the pros and cons, I decided on sound replacement. This will give me more power to shape a better kit later on without the stress of being in the tracking moment. So keep in mind that we will be replacing the kick, snare and toms later on in editing.
So I proceeded to set up PT LE to record with plug-ins kind of like using outboard gear for tracking (that’s another story). The cool thing is, I can have the drummer play and I can record him “raw”. Then I can calmly set my gate, EQ, and compression as I see fit to help me isolate my drum hits to better help me later on in editing. The drum being tuned as best as possible is absolutly nessessary. After all, we are not replacing the sounds with other drum samples, we are going to sample off the drum itself to maintain cohesiveness in the mixing process.
For tracking, I chose the following setup:
Snare Top: Gate-Compressor-EQ-Limiting
Snare Bot: Compressor-EQ-Limiting
OH L: Compressor-EQ-Limiting
OH R: Compressor-EQ-Limiting
Kick: Gate-EQ-Limiting
Tom Hi: Gate-Compressor-E-Limiting
Tom Lo: Gate-Compressor-EQ-Limiting
All my settings where extremely light. 2:1 ratio on compression with a negative 3db threshhold and light applications of EQ to compinsate for the room.
Since getting the initial sound wasn’t extremely important, I did manage the get a good close mike on the sources. I tracked it as if I was trying to get the best sound, but I relied more on my gates to evenly cut my tracks.
Other than that, not too hefty. You’re simply just worrying about getting a good performance and good sounds to work with later on. So I would say the main priority in this stage are the Overheads and Hi hat microphones (since they won’t be replaced later on).
Sampling for Sound Replacement
Over time, I experimented with many different approaches to get great drum sounds. Some people choose to replace the sound with an outside sample. The only problem I found with this is that it’s very telling.
I’ve tried sound replacer on drums with sample CDs and while it’s great, it fails to come off natural to my ear. So I eventually developed an extra step after I’m always done tracking my drums that I am a lot more happy with. Simple put, it’s a session I do after I’ve tracked *all* the drums.
At this point, we tear down the drums and begin to capture samples one by one from the same drumset used for the album. This does 2 things:
1) It creates a great and natural blend from the drums captured in the overhead and hihat mic.
2) It allows you to give individual attention to each drum, thus allowing you to build custom sounds off the drum set you are using.
In this stage, the focus now is getting great individual sounds off the kit to sample later on. The higher the quality your approach to this, the better. Remember, this samples are gonna beef up the kit, so your approach to this will dictate how your kit improves later on.
For example, I had the drummer take the kit apart while leaving the kick drum in the middle of the room. Using the most suitable preamps for the task, I set up three mics presisely and had them on 3 individual channels. I gave special attention to EQing with no use of gates or compression.
I create a new and seperate session titled “Drum Samples” and proceed to recording my samples. I have the drummer hit the drum with different sticks, different intensities, different ends of the stick, etc. This way we can sort through the hits later on and find at least 3 good takes to work with. I say 3 because it always helps to have alternating sounds. If your snare sounds the same with every hit, then you risk making it machine-like, which defeats the purpose. Luckily, the overheads capture the “natural” performance of the drums, so the blend of the overheads with the sampled drums will help erase some of the “machine”.
This first step is probably one of the more intense ones, before going into editing.
0:30-1:07 Editing & Basic Mix
Now that we have all the tools we need to work with, we have to consider what we are trying to accomplish. This band in particular likes the “razor sharp” timing style, so that means extremely painful editing work on my part.
I have two daunting tasks ahead of me: 1) Groove Editing and 2) Sound Replacement.
Groove Editing
We agreed that the the drummer was playing slower than intented (no click) so we have to bring it back up to speed. So not only are we speeding up the take, we are aligning each hit on a graph to correct his inconsistency.
After counting the bpm of the original take (count the beats in 10 seconds and then multiply by 6) we decide what we can get it to. I didn’t want to sway too much from the performance, so I figured about 156 was about right to set my graph to.
Once my graph is set, then comes the royal pain in the ass.
-First I have to select the good takes and isolate them. I simply do this by cutting a little before and after the region I want. After I’ve done that, I place them roughly in the order intended (verse, chorus, etc) and begin to cut. It is important that you group your tracks before you continue.
If you are good at using Beat Detective, then you can apply your cuts with the presicion of Beat Detective. Plus it does fansy shit like aling your cuts to the graph for you. However, you have to do this in small pieces. I would say no more than 8 or 16 bars at a time.
I personally don’t trust BD yet, so I do it the old fashion way. I group my tracks and then make my cuts using the Kick, Snare and Click track. I use the kick and snare tracks since they usually define your rhythm as well as being easy to cut from. Lucky for me, PT7 seems to have a feature to auto detect transient zero crossings. Very helpful when you’re trying not to cut off the valuble milliseconds needed for a kick and snare hit. Plus, the timing depends on it. So if you’re too far off or cutting off the intial attacks you risk having clicks that may show up later on and you’ll have a hard time creating a steady groove.
So in the end, the whole process looks like making a few different drum loops at various sections of the song. Also an important note to remember is how you choose to connect certain parts. Keeping in mind what cymbal decay is happening and/or any preface-like effect. Nothing more frustrating than getting a weird cymbal decay tail show up out of nowhere.
Also, in this stage I tend to edit and/or create drum fills seperately from the main loops. Then once they are aligned well enough to the graph, I simply bring them back in and crossfade well enough to create a natural blend.
The wicked cool part is, once you are done with this and you have aligned all your hits to the graph, everything suddenly gets easier and precise. So you’ve turned what as a horrid and off performance into a solid piece. (Which we’ve already debated many times Before. I personally know my stance against edited material, but well, I also refuse to create sloppy material).
Sound Replacement
Now comes the part where all the pieces of the puzzle come together. It’s actually here where I have some fun creating sample sounds from the sounds we previously got in our tracking session. I would open my Drum Sample session and begin to play around. I might choose to EQ the snare thicker here. Or maybe apply light reverbs. Basically, anything I can do to create a larger than life sound is where I’m getting at.
After each of my drums are set up the way I like them, I begin to bounce my multi source tracks into a single mono source for each drum. So in the end I would have done this:
From the drum sample session:
Snare tracks bounce into mono track (with FX)
Kick tracks bounced into mono track (with FX)
Tom tracks bounced into mono tracks (with FX)
Plus I make sure that each starts neatly at the beginning of the transient, with no silent space in the beginning (like sampling for a drum machine). I might have it decay for about a second or two to have more to work with later on.
Now we can go back to our main session and either do one of two things: 1) Use sound replacer to replace our hits or 2) manually import the session information and replace the hits one by one. In the end you’ve managed to do two things: 1) Completely isolate each drum for a full and clear sound and 2) You’ve beefed up the kit with a larger than life sound of each of your drums.
Once I’m done, I end up with these tracks:
New snare replaces old “Snare Top”
New kick replaces old kick
New Toms replace old toms
At this point I can start creating a basic mix with no FX, EQ or processing. I can then start living with the new sound to then proceed to the next step.
1:07-1:42 Mixed with FX
With everything set up, cleaned and aligned, I can proceed to the best part: Mixing. Lucky for me I’ve created my own custom mixing template a long time ago that I use for all my mixing sessions. In short, the template is only a set of aux tracks that I will need for most sessions.
Bus 1-2: Is my short delay
Bus 3-4: Is my long delay
Bus 5-6: Is my Short Verb
Bus 7-8: Is my Long Verb
Bus 9-10: Is my Drum Verb
Bus11-12: Is my pitch shift
Bus 13-14: Used to be my chorus, but now it’s just an open FX aux.
With that, I’m ready to mix. I’m sure to create sends on my drum tracks in this order:
Short Delay-Verb-Long Delay-FX
Panning for this session was:
Snare (center)
Kick (center)
Hi Hat (15L)
Overheads (70/70)
Hi Tom ( 38L)
Lo Tom (50R)
After panning and setting levels to the auxes, I’m pretty much done with that. I perhaps would treat the Snare top and Toms with heavy duty compression to bring out some impact. This one is really the free-for-all. Sometimes I do this and sometimes I don’t. Other people might not do this or they might. So you can develop your own style in this aspect.
1:42-2:30 Final Touch
Once my drum mix is done, I can decide that it’s either done, or that something is left to do. In this case, just for the sake of possiblities, I want to decide that the drums need more punch.
In my case, I applied moderate compression to the overall drum set with a high threshold to put some impact in our drummers playing. However, this is something I would only do in stem mixing, not in the main mixing.
From point A-Z, we have succesfully turned a marginal drummer into a chick magnet.
Anyway, I'll see you guys in a few weeks.
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. I figure that in itself will need another explination in itself.