A little help on drumsets

[DaveDrummer]

Heres the thing. AS some of you know im young (15) and I cant afford all the nice software and studio tools and etc. I do have a full drumset micing setup, a mixer, a 4-track and WaveLab and a few plugins (complements of my freind). My question is, some people have said you should treat each drum like its a seperate track. makes sense. But on my 4-track, I have to treat (compression, EQ, reverb) the entire set as a whole. iget pretty good results, but im sure it could be better if I could like, EQ only the kick isntead of the snare, or etc. you can see how this is a real pain in the ass. The only way to EQ is to do it on my mixer before recording. So I quess I experiement. Any ideas, thing I could buy? ahh!

Dave

 

[13th_Omen]

First off, when premixing the kit, turn off all the mics except for the overheads. Set the eq to where the kick sounds as good as you can get it just with the overheads. Then, slowly bleed each of your other mic channels in just as much as you need.

 

[mikeh]

A drum set should be recorded as a drum set (not as individual drums).

As 13th said, a good thing to do is get the drums sounding as good as you can in the room (ie: the overheads) and then dial in some snare or kick or whatever as needed to balance out the mix.

Compression on the kick can help manage the spikes and compression on the snare may help fatten up the sound (but it is not always needed). Some individual reverb on the snare (and maybe toms can add some space - but may not be needed depending on the room ambiance.

Naturally, if your room doesn't sound good, the overheads will reflect that - and that is where close mic'ing becomes more important.