music to the ears of the drummer....

[trdn1]

Ok here's the deal, my band is recording live drums to four track (through a mixer - the brand or type for any of these is unimportant) The big question is, is how we give the drummer something to drum to, while we only want the drum mics to pick up the drums. Since time and money is limited, we are recording the drums separate from other tracks (guitar, vocals) - they will be added later with cool edit This is a very professional mixing board we are using, is there a way to run all the drum mics into the board, and just send out those tracks to the 4-track ALL THE WHILE, putting guitar and vocals into the same board, and send those signals JUST to the drummer, without them going to the 4-track? Is there a technique or term behind this that I could use to tell the guy who runs the board so he knows what I talking about? I know this has a million questions, but an answer to just one, or just an example of what you have done in the past would be great, thanks

[James HE]

Basically you need to run two seperate mixes from the board, one just drums which goes to the fourtrack, and one with drums and everything else, which goes to the headphones. I have to say it... the BRAND and TYPE of your mixer is very important here, because it will define how you go about setting up the two mixes. So tell us... what is the mixer, how many busses, aux sends, etc...
Without knowing your board I can only guess. How are you running the mix from the board to the fourtrack? How many drum tracks are you recording at one time? Ok lets go back a step, you first must have seperation of all the instruments. How is the band hearing themselves, you will need headphones of course. And everthing will run into the board- provided you have enough inputs. OK here is the tricky part (depending on your mixer) making sure that the signal you don't want going into the recorder isn't. So you will either have seperate busses... (your fine if you do, just send what you dont want to and what you do want to different busses) if you don't have enough busses, you can use an aux send as a "buss" if you have a pre fader aux send, then you can just turn down the fader of the signals you don't want so that they don't go in to the drum mix) or maybe you have some kind of control room out where you can select different sources to monitor...

OK here is how I do it with my Mackie 1402 (well one way, it depends on the situation, here is how I would do it in your situation) On the Mackie there is a Left/right out and an ALT 3-4 out (these are busses). I ususaly send the signal (we'll say drums) to the recorder (DAW) from the 3/4 buss. so I select ALT 3-4 for those channels. Everthing else (guitar, bass, what ever is being monitored) is assigned to the Main L/R mix. The Mackie has a control room out, and can choose which signals go to it. I send the 3-4 buss to the control room, and then send the control room to the Main mix. (so now in the main mix I am hearing 3-4 as well as the main mix) my headphone amp is fed from the main L/R out. So for me it's just a matter of hitting the right buttons. It all depends on the mixer.

-jhe



[Edited by James HE on 11-06-2000 at 00:04]

[Hard2Hear]

When recording drums on my Mackie 1604 I use the direct outs of channel 1,2,3,4 into my 4 track soundcard and run guitar or other things through other channels and feed the main sends out. Or hook up a really long neadphone line to the headphone out and send to my drummer.
So I think James is right in that it depends on the capabilities of your mixer.

[trdn1]

thanks for the info - i should have found out what kind of mixer it was, true. Now, about mic placement...I'm assuming that Led Zep used a omni-directional mic when they used the 'one-mic' technique of recording their drums. Was it placed high above the drum kit, or in some other magical location? I guess it depends on the room. Lets suppose that we're recording the drums in a large auditorium, has anyone ever done this before? And if so, any problems/sweet spots that you discovered? thanks again

[Diragor]

Ah, memories of the old 4-track days . Man, I'm still amazed at what we got out of the old Tascam back then.

I have a possibly helpful tip on mic'ing. When I did it we had no mixer at all, just a 4-track machine with two simultaneous inputs. We used two very cheap mics, I don't remember what kind exactly. One mic was placed directly above the kit, which picked up snare, cymbals and the attack of the toms. The other mic was placed by experimentation about 3-4 feet in front of the kit, 6 inches to a foot off the ground, off-center from the bass drum, kind of centered in the middle of the toms. Thats is, for four toms it would be placed in between the two middle toms. There it picked up all the low end of the kit, with the toms and kick fairly even because it wasn't directly in front. The toms may not be completely even if they're really spread out, but I keep my kit pretty tight and it worked well.