Top tips for drum tracking at home

I suppose if you think about it thats how dance music came about - people realised you could create cool sounding beats that don't sound anything like the "classic" drum sounds everyone was used to
{haha cheers, nearly got a white christmas but missed it by one day}
 
YorkshireTrippe said:
I suppose if you think about it thats how dance music came about - people realised you could create cool sounding beats that don't sound anything like the "classic" drum sounds everyone was used to
{haha cheers, nearly got a white christmas but missed it by one day}
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Hehe....well, I don't know about that. "Dance music" has been around WAAAAAYYYYY longer than electronic drums, or even.....electricity. :)
 
fris9 said:
I guess this is where I get a little confused.....If I'm not using compression, and let's say I need to hear one instrument over another while recording I shouldn't crank that fader to get more volume?

The way I've always done is set the fader at zero and make sure I'm not going into the red. Is that wrong? Faders just control the volume, right? Input signal solely controls the input level right? Sorry if this is extremely basic....like I said, I usually just record and make sure I'm not going into the red.
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The attack transients of drums are very high and fast, and your meters are too slow to register them. If you don't give the track some headroom by peaking the meter at -6 or so, there will be distortion. This sounds great on tape but baaaad with digital.
 
Myr said:
The level fader in your DAW should only control the output. Input gain should be a separate entity. Are you talking about monitoring here? If so, I'd just turn the other stuff down to be safe, and rather bring it back up during mixing.
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Got it. So, should the input gain be dominated more by the preamp coming into the interface, i.e. Mackie board or Preamp, or the actual input on the interface? High gain on the preamp signal coming into the interface and then moderate the level or vice versa? Or does it matter?
 
For the record, I get a GREAT drum sound recording at home. But that's because I AM a drummer, and when I first "started up" my home studio I immediately went for the drum tracking route. Not to mention I have a killer 2 car deep rectangular garage to record in w/ 10 foot ceilings. Its pretty amazing.
 
Seafroggys said:
For the record, I get a GREAT drum sound recording at home. But that's because I AM a drummer, and when I first "started up" my home studio I immediately went for the drum tracking route. Not to mention I have a killer 2 car deep rectangular garage to record in w/ 10 foot ceilings. Its pretty amazing.
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I'm in the market for some new overheads, in the medium price range. Any recommendations?
 
I also get great drums....at home ....at someone elses home....in a bigtime studio...live....I'm not a drummer but i know drums, and getting great drums involves a lot of patience, a good drummer, and the ability to place the mics at the right spots.

Another VERY important aspect is to not overthink the drums. I can use anything from three mics to 12 or more depending on the drummer, the kit, and the room. In that order.

The style of music doesnt matter so much as the PLAYING of the style will dictate the needs.

A good drummer will be able to understand the importance of changes in his tuning, set up, and other things necessary to compensate for anomolies in the recording environment.

Tuning is the MOST important device you can apply to a drumkit to focus the sound in any particular room. It may NOT be the tuning that is needed in a live situation, and it may NOT be something that sounds particularly great on its own, but in the context of the recording, it may be perfect.

Most times, the outside set of ears has a better perspective on this than the band.

Great mics help on a drum kit more than ANY OTHER instrument. Pres have to be able to handle fast transients. They dont have to be great or expensive, but they do have to be fast.

Those of you using digital technologies know exactly what the signal from a drum hit looks like. Choose preamps that can sort this kind of quick and immediate peaking with ease. This is also a lesson in gain-staging. You need to let as much signal through as possible without clipping the input. Opening the input sensitivity, allows for more of the tone of the transients to pass. Again, the threshold is the clipping indicator, be it a light (usually several db BEFORE real clipping) or a meter (bounce into peak but not staying there). In conjunction with your ears you should be able to set a relatively high gain but staying below -6db on the average output. Its true that theres not loss at -12db but there isnt enough tone on many low-end devices at that level to make a big drum sound.

And a big drum sound makes a big sounding recording no matter what the style of music.
 
fris9 said:
I'm in the market for some new overheads, in the medium price range. Any recommendations?
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I went for some LDC's....Rode NT2-a's to be exact. They sound really smooth and great. Some people think they sound too bright, I almost always end up bumping up the high shelf by 1 db or so.
 
fris9 said:
So basically just record all tracks at the highest levels without or with minimal clipping?
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No, there is no reason to record that hot. Much of the digital recording equipment out there now is calibrated to 0db vu= -18dbfs. Some may be around -20, my Adat HD24 is at -15. Your manual should tell you where it's calibrated and your meters may also give you a visual cue (-15 on my Adat meters are red)

So, if your converters and meters are calibrated to -18dbfs = 0dbvu, when you hit -15 you're at +3 dbvu and at -12 you're at +6. That's plenty hot for the majority of your peaks and will give you a nice cushion for those times when you get a little overly enthusiastic and whack the drums really hard. If you get the occasional stray peak that goes sailing up the scale toward the top of the meter, that's fine.

Recording with plenty of headroom like I've described here will help maintain a good gain structure throughout the recording and mixing process and almost always results in a better sounding finished product. I know, I have boxes full of way too hot and burned up tracks on Adat tape from back when first started in digital recording and didn't understand how to propely gain stage a recording. If you want it to come out loud in the finished product, tracking is not the place to make that happen. You're more likely to come out with something that sounds decent loud if you leave that headroom in.

Good Luck
 
Cool, thanks for all the help. I still am confused about the gain on the pre's going into the interface vs the gain levels on the interface itself. I.E......which should be the dominant as far as input level?
 
fris9 said:
Cool, thanks for all the help. I still am confused about the gain on the pre's going into the interface vs the gain levels on the interface itself. I.E......which should be the dominant as far as input level?
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Not exactly sure of all the particulars of your setup but my gut reaction is neither should be dominant, I'd shoot for as close to unity gain as I could.
 
I have a Mackie 808 board that I usually track the drums out of, although I do have a UA Solo 610 Tube, but only has one out : (
 
gtrman_66 said:
No, there is no reason to record that hot. Much of the digital recording equipment out there now is calibrated to 0db vu= -18dbfs. Some may be around -20, my Adat HD24 is at -15. Your manual should tell you where it's calibrated and your meters may also give you a visual cue (-15 on my Adat meters are red)

So, if your converters and meters are calibrated to -18dbfs = 0dbvu, when you hit -15 you're at +3 dbvu and at -12 you're at +6. That's plenty hot for the majority of your peaks and will give you a nice cushion for those times when you get a little overly enthusiastic and whack the drums really hard. If you get the occasional stray peak that goes sailing up the scale toward the top of the meter, that's fine.

Recording with plenty of headroom like I've described here will help maintain a good gain structure throughout the recording and mixing process and almost always results in a better sounding finished product. I know, I have boxes full of way too hot and burned up tracks on Adat tape from back when first started in digital recording and didn't understand how to propely gain stage a recording. If you want it to come out loud in the finished product, tracking is not the place to make that happen. You're more likely to come out with something that sounds decent loud if you leave that headroom in.

Good Luck
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This is great advice and true . My HD24 is also set the same way and when I talk about -6db I'm looking at the average on my stereo ouput meters at the board...(Soundcraft Ghost) In that case I'm hitting the converters in the Sony master Burner at about -6dbfs which gives you enough headroom for mastering.

My point about drum sounds is to get as much signal into your preamps as possible without going over the limits detailed in your equipments' manuals. I am old school when it comes to hitting it hard but digital overs arent a things of beauty and these need to be adhered to strictly.
 
fris9 said:
Ok....so, maybe a dumb question, but why only record to -6? Why not to just below clipping? Don't you want as much signal as possible?
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If you track to tape, you may want to push levels to compress the tone and add saturation, and you always want as high of a level as sounds OK, because the noise floor is usually on the border of annoying unless you are using noise reduction (which I don't) and if the levels on the tape are arbitrarily set lower, the noise floor is closer to the signal and more noticeable.

In digital recording, even with 16-bit, the noise floor isn't usually an issue. OTOH, digital doesn't distort gracefully, so if you go "over" on level, you just get a flat clip distortion on output.

The basic point is: don't have any overs.

However, you are also better off to set levels based upon a choice of a reference level (say -20 dB or lower) based upon the time-averaged level of a typical loud (forte) passage and let the peak levels fall where they may, so long as you safely avoid overs.

Peak levels are a curious artifact of the particular waveform you have on a particular take and are not necessarily related to real perceived musical loudness, which relates to time-averaged levels, the kind indicated by an RMS-meter or an old VU meter. The only reason to pay any attention to peak levels is to make sure you don't have overs.

I hope that helps.

Cheers,

Otto
 
There's no reason you can't get really cool drum sounds at home. Notice I said really COOL, you may not get CLA sounding drums or stuff tracked at Ocean Way, but that doesn't mean the sound you get won't work for the song.

Like people have said, there is no reason to get near 0 dbfs while tracking at 24 bit. If you need the extra volume the TURN UP YOUR MONITORS. What you track isn't going to be even close to the volume of mastered tracks you listen to on your system.

I would suggest not tracking with compression either, if you know exactly what you want and have access to great compressors, then go for it, but most of the time that's not the case for tracking at home. You can always add compression later, but you can't take it off if it's already there.

Tracking at home and getting someone experienced to mix it can be a great idea. A lot of magic can happen in mixing and some people just have a knack for it. If you can find some of those people then your recording will sound a heck of a lot better.
 
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