I posted this before but I thought it was relevant
I have a technique for close micing a drum set and creating a virtual "stereo recording" as if it were recorded several feet away with a pair of stereo mics. Here it is.
Step one: Don't worry about phase considerations when micing the drums because we will correct for that later in our DAW. Just put them where it sounds good and DON'T EQ THEM, pick the right mic.
step 2: record the track and if you have the ability to record 8 tracks at once, do it...(And let the english see you do it!) Then assign each mic to its own seperate track. Next... align the attack and phase of all eight tracks so that they line up perfectly to the nth degree.
step 3:Make a copy of those tracks and place them on tracks 9-16. We will NOT be using any panning in our technique to create our sound stage because we will be using delays to simulate that. Normalize all your tracks, remove silence, so forth and so on.
We are just using the delay effect to move a particular track in time, as opposed to using it as an effect. Now assign tracks 9-16 to an aux bus and attach a delay to that. Don't use any feedback or predelays or anything.
In this effect we will be creating the "delay of the distance between our VIRTUAL Stereo mics".I hope you are all familiar with that technique.
Now how far apart are those 2 mics? A couple inches... which is equivalent to a couple milleseconds at most. Sound would of course reach those 2 mics at different (very small) times. Pick a delay of say 5ms and set it to the delay on the auxillary bus. Make sure the time you choose keeps the coherent phase response you created earlier, or you will get comb filtering at output.
step 4: Pan the first eight tracks hard left, and pan the next eight tracks hard right.Send the output of the aux bus of tracks 9-16 and the outputs of tracks 1-8 to the main output.
Now you have a true stereo representation of the 2 virtual mics and the distance betwween them and the sound "effect" equivalent of thier spacing.
Step five: Optional. Now you need to calulate the distance the drum kit is from those 2 virtual mics 10 ft, 20 ft however far back you want it sound like the live recording was made. We are not done though.
Think about this though. isn't the floor tom further away than say the kick or the toms? In this... wouldn't the sound from the kick and toms reach the stereo mics BEFORE the sound from the floor tom? It maybe a short distance but it matters.
Now assign a delay to all sixteen tracks and set them to full wet and 0 dry signal... with all DELAY "effects" OFF.
Now... which ever drums are the same distance from the mic cluster, you can remove the delay from that track and it's corresponding COPY track.
Don't mess with the delay that is on that aux bus. That has already been set for our stereo mic simulation.Only on the individual delays of the individual tracks are we making adjustments now. But what ever change you do to the snare on track one, you should be doing to the snare track on track 9 and so forth for all the tracks.
Now... set different delay times for the individual drums. Set the snare to 3ms, the cymbals to 4 or 5 ms, the floor tom to 8 ms and make sure that all the delays are smaller than 15 ms. The further the drum is from the mic, the larger the delay for its track should be and vice versa.The numbers i picked are not actual representations of the calculations just some numbers in the ballpark for effect.
Now just ad whatever type of reverb you want on the master output and run the final stage through that to simulate your room environment.Here you can do anything that you want. Just make sure that all tracks are getting to the reverb... POST individual track delays... and POST the auxillary bus delay that tracks 9-16 should be going through.
You could even go a step further and assign an eq to each individual delay to accomodate for high frequency roll offs of certain frequencies in regard of the distance to the VIRTUAL stereo mics.
Your gonna need a fast computer to hear it in real time because of all the delays. If it's not fast... just make the settings that I said and render it down. You will most likely be happy with the results.You probably won't be able to pinpoint WHY it sounds better but it just will, and you will know it.
This can all be done with 8 mics, a sound card with 8 inputs, an 8 channel mixer, and cakewalk Pro 8 or 9 with cakewalks standard effects. For your reverb effect try using Sonic foundry's acoustic mirror plugin. (That runs like crap in cakewalk by the way.) Or a good outboard reverb.
Let me know how it turns out if you try it.
) sit down plays- he likes it at first, then after playing a bit decides it just not right, retunes the toms- and were off. I'm glad he did- cuz they fit his style and the music as a whole. Anyways, enough of my rambling. Not even sure what the point of all this is. hmm... oh yeah. just like Col Forbin's signatures in all his emails.
Almost. I use a string with markings on it.