drums too warm

C

catalystdrums12

New member
arite heres where I am. I have a decent mackie mixer, and a full set of drum mics (mics on all drums, 1 overhead, 1 room mic). When I plug my headphones into the mixer and play. It sounds really good the way I have the mixer eq and everything. The problem is. When I record it at 48khz, 24 bit resolution, the drums are a lot warmer than they were in the headphones b4 recording. I've done a lot of eq work on this and I still can't seem to get that sound that I hear in the cds of my favorite bands. I would say I know a pretty large amount about recording and drum tuning so don't hold back. I was thinking it might be the room but i'm hoping there is a solution b4 that. If anyone wants to know, i'm using the emu m1212 system.

Thanks for any help
 
Get a good set of reference headphones. It's really hard to mix with inadequate headphones. You need something close to your monitors in sound. I don't think there's anything wrong with your rig. Some headphone hype the bass and some don't have enough.
 
You could also be hearing both the mics and live bleed through the 'phones while you play which could give you a more complex sound.
Wayne
 
You WILL be hearing both the mics and bleed from the drums. If your kit sounds good to your ears, mess with the mic placement on each of the problem tracks. You're gonna have to eq it after recording. Another option is drum triggers or Drumagog.
 
I don't know exactly about e-mu products specifically but I thought they were made by the same company as Ensoniq products and EMU/Ensoniq are all one in the same. At any rate, I've recorded on an Ensoniq Paris SystemIII about three years ago (got to spend an open ended amount of time in mixdown) and I swear it definitely colored the sound to an extent that I was was not very pleased between monitoring on the headphones and what the system captured. I'm not poo-poo-ing your equipment but my experience with Emu/Ensoinq products is that they do not capture the audio EXACTLY the same way you hear it when it's monitored. I would always get a kick-ass mix in the headphone but as soon as it captured the audio, the playback was really BLAH and lacked the life the headphone mix had. I was really let down by Ensoniq and tried everything from re-routing patches in different ways but nothing ever fixed the BLAH problem. I don't know how to explain this but I know exactly what you're talking about. If you're lacking certain freqeuncy elements, the only workaround I found was to overcompensate on the EQ in the mixer before capturing the audio. Otherwise, there's better stuff out there and chock your purchase up to a learning experience and look into getting something better or just understand the limitations of what happenes to the audio after it's captured and pull your hair out working from there.
 
What mics? That's a big part of the sound right there. The Mackie pres aren't stellar, but they're not excreble either. If the sound your ears gets is different from the sound your "tape" gets, I'd look to the drums/drummer first, the room next and then the mics. Sounds like perhaps you have phase issues - try getting a workable sound with OH, kick and snare and then adding mics if you need them.
 
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