Recording Tambourines

[Danny Chung]

I've only just joined this BBS and this is my first post here, so please bear with me for a second.

I decided to recreate the Beatles "And Your Bird Can Sing" on my little ZOOM PS-02. There's a tambourine part on the original record which I'm interested in recreating. The guitars and bass parts were easy enough to record.

A search on this BBS dug up one earlier discussion on tambourines. The main points to consider were get a good quality tambourine, keep the tambourine about 8-10 inches away from the mike and use condensors.

This may sound obvious, however I'm interested in finding out if tambourines are allocated an empty track for its exclusive use when it is overdubbed in professional studios. Anyone know how the Beatles did it? Did they bounce all the other tracks to free up two tracks for the vocals and tambourine?

Many thanks

[gorbyrun]

I'm afraid I don't know how the beatles did it, but I doubt they would bounce their whole mix to add tamborine unless they were already doing it for, like you pointed out, vocals. At my studio I overdub it and put it on it's own track. As far as which mic to use, I would try my dynamic mics as well, because many large capsule condensers may distort a bit due to the fast high pitched transients. You can find more info on this in Harvey's sticky thread in the Mic forum. Welcome to the BBS.

[chessrock]

There's a very good mic you can buy for tamborie which happens to only cost $35. Behringer ecm8000 -- I don't like it on much else, but it's great on hand percussion.

[cominginsecond]

Originally posted by chessrock
There's a very good mic you can buy for tamborie which happens to only cost $35. Behringer ecm8000 -- I don't like it on much else, but it's great on hand percussion.

Amen, but these are also very good on drum overheads.

[TexRoadkill]

Originally posted by Danny Chung
This may sound obvious, however I'm interested in finding out if tambourines are allocated an empty track for its exclusive use when it is overdubbed in professional studios. Anyone know how the Beatles did it? Did they bounce all the other tracks to free up two tracks for the vocals and tambourine?

Many thanks

Tracks aren't a problem with most digital studios. Are you working with a 4 track or somthing?

[Chibi Nappa]

Originally posted by chessrock
There's a very good mic you can buy for tamborie which happens to only cost $35. Behringer ecm8000 -- I don't like it on much else, but it's great on hand percussion.

Yup. Whenever I record a live jazz band or something like that, the extra percussion player gets a $35 emc8000 plunked down in front of him and it sounds great. That includes tambourines. Just be prepared to deal with tons of bleed if you use it in a live recording.

(slightly off topic) And I never would have belived this if I didn't actually do it, but I've gotten terrific sounds using the emc8000 to close mic a snare drum for a pop band. I was recording a band playing a small microbrew/resturant. I ran out of SM57s, and the only mic I had left to record the snare was the berhinger. I thought it was almost not worth the track, but I put it there anyway to see if it got anything usefull, and it came out terrific! The vibe of the whole thing was almost an accoustic unplugged show type thing and the drummer was using those drum sticks that are sort of like bundles of tiny sticks instead of solid drumsticks. I'll have to post an mp3 of that show someday...