Mixing Drums - One Mic Track

A

adam79

New member
I'm mixing a recording for a friend's punk band with Pro Tools 7.3 LE. I have 3 drum tracks to work with.. one MCA SP1 was placed a few inches from the kit, at tom level, one SM-57 on the snare and one SM-57 close mic'd to the (closed) kick. Unfortunately, the kit they had was pretty much salvaged from someone else's trash.. it sounded terrible. They didn't want to spend time tuning the kit, so it is what it is. The kick is loose and muddy; the snare loose and rings.

Here's a sample of the drum sound from the kit mic: http: / / members.toast.net/adam79/drums.mp3 --the site wouldn't let me post the link, so I had to put in a couple spaces next to the slashes for the post to go though.

Does anyone have any suggestions on a way to go about mixing the drums? Especially the kit mic track.. I've swept through the frequencies with a narrow Q (10) and boosted Gain (+6dB) to find any sweet spots, as well as the nasty ones. Any other techniques that you all could share with me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Adam
 
I couldn't figure out how to make your link work, so couldn't hear what you have. However, from the description of the mic set up, I suspect you have a difficult task. I'd be looking to replace the kick and snare with samples.
 
You aren't going to make a silk purse from a sow's ear -- There's nothing that's going to change the core of the kit (short of "creating" tracks and manual drum replacement).

That said -- As it is, it's hard to tell how it fits into a mix... If you can make it sound like it "sounds that way on purpose" then you're golden.
 
They screwed themselves by badly recording a crappy, untuned drum set. You could try to replace the kick and snare, but the wash in the overheads will still sound like garbage.

The best suggestion is to use what you act like the kit was meant to sound like that. It's not poorly recorded, it's an artistic decision.
 
Without hearing it with the rest of the song, it's not going to be easy to give good advice.

The only thing I would say is about the mic that was inches from the kit at about tom level. Putting a mic there (given your other mics and their positions) is going to do a couple of bad things. One it's not going to give you a good representation of the cymbals. Your drum mix is dominated by the kick/snare/toms. Relatively speaking, there isn't a lot of cymbals in the mix. The second thing it does is create a "mushy"cymbal sound. Instead of being clear, they kind of indistinct and splashy. And that "mushiness" will vary depending on what cymbal(s) the drummer is hitting.

If I could only recommend one thing, and you could track it again, and you don't have any more equipment - move that mic so it's above the cymbals - maybe two feet above them. Once it's at that height, then play around with lateral movement so you get the best representation of the cymbals.

Obviously, if you had more mics, then you can start talking about stereo micing and such.
 
study the andy johns method...
and especially in regards to capturing john bonham's kit.
even if that's not your sound/goal, the technique is valid.
 
look at your drum EQ (with an analyzer function), bring down some of the peaks, use a light compression maybe 3:1, fast-ish attack, use a tempo/bpm chart to time the release to the song tempo. Accentuate the super high treble (15k to 20k) by maybe 2-3 db for that shimmer. it can fake "quality"

try using a tiny amount of short reverb (do a room designer plug in, logics is called space designer)

this can give it some dynamics

also, if you have any stereo imaging tricks, that can widen the track.

now, this won't fix it, but it'll deluxe your drum track. Also, if you record the other instruments to have that bedroom feel, the listener won't say "oh the drums sound shitty" they'll say "oh its a punk record"

ex) record the guitar cab with a mic a good foot or two away instead of right on it.


also, you could trigger a snare and bass to accentuate but not replace the current snare and bass tracks.
 
If that was what I had to work with I would be programming the drums for certain. Actually, that drum track (as long as it never gets any more intense) wouldn't take long to program up at all.
 
I came back to see what others had posted and there's lots of good advice here.
I will second the ideas of programming a new drum track with a drum VST instrument or taking the attitude that it's punk and that's how the drums sound (while maybe augmenting kick and snare with samples.)
 
Thanks for all the advice. Everything has already been tracked; the bass was DI and the guitar close mic'd w/ a 57. He had the reverb dimed, so that track is a bit tricky. I'm not gonna re-sample anything.. I don't have the software to do it, and it doesn't sound like something they would want. I've messed around with compression on that drum track and think it sounds better without any.. I might double up the track and use compression on one.
 
I would chalk this one up to experience.

You can get a good drum sound with a single mic, using judicious tuning and careful mic placement. This wasn't one of those times.
 
I was able to fix things up pretty well.. I'm still not done mixing, but I was able to get that bedroom reverb sound off of the drums. I pretty much cut out all but the high frequencies from that main drum track and compressed the shit out of the snare and kick. I had to put the volume WAY down on most of the tracks to clean things up, but I made up for the volume on the master fader.
 
I'm almost done with the mix. I only have a set of bookshelf speakers and headphones to mix on. Here's a link to one of the tracks.. I think I did a pretty good job considering what I had to work with (i.e. the drum track that I originally posted). Please give me any suggestions on the mix. Thanks.

I had to put a space between the semicolon for it to post the link.

http : //members.toast.net/adam79/high.mp3
 
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