General guestions about recording drums

[Apple]

I'm in the process of recording drums properly for the first time. Never had room for them until recently. My studio space consists of a control room and the room I record in which has curtains on three sides and a reflective side. I've read 3 reflective sides is the norm. I'm using two overhead capacitor mics and a D112 on the bass and SM 57's on the snares and toms. I've got the bottom heads on my toms and have cotton gauze lightly taped to the bottom skins of the toms and the dampening rings on the top skins-including the snare. I've done my best to tune them and now I've made a test recording and it's very subjective. I guess all that's wrong is that it's hard to play drums well without the music-It's almost impossible to record the guitar first and then play drums. Or play to a click track very well. My question is, based on what I'm doing, any likes and dislikes you can offer? Bottom skins off, or no dampening of the bottom and or top skins? EQ-better to cut than add? The snare is what I'm most concerned with I guess and the performance in general. I've been unable to competely cut out bleed through to the sm57's using my gate, but it cuts it back much. I made a test recording, with guitar, bass and vocals to see what i got. Basically a garage band recording. I hope I can ultimately create an inspired drum part by myself without accompanianment. I'm mainly a guitar player, but my first instrument was drums, and it's my understanding that it is possible to do this. Anyone out there routinely and successfully make their own recordings and play all the instruments including real drums?

 

[Bulls Hit]

Sure you can.

I don't have any damping on my drums and I don't eq, compress or put filters on while recording - I do all that afterwards in the box.

I'd suggest not making your recording room too absorbent and dead sounding. Don't worry about bleed, but watch for phase cancellation between the mics.

I've found it easiest to record drums first b4 guitar or anything else. Also you don't have to record a whole 'song' at once. If you can play to a consistent tempo, or use a click, you can record seperate breaks or just groove and then cut & splice beats together and create your own loops. That's what I do anyway

 

[Apple]

I've thought about recording in pieces

The only thing I don't like about potentially recording in pieces is playing to a click track. Very hard to do on the drums for some reason. I've seen a studio quality drummer have problems with it. Have you had good success recording in pieces and not using a click track. What about a click lead in? Can you only edit between long breaks? I have an HD-24 and haven't really tried that yet, but have thought about it. In case trying to record the whole drum part without music proved impossible. I seem to keep pretty good time.