Another Newbie Question (or 2)

S

substance

New member
Ok, we're recording in a smaller sized room (18X18) with thick curtain and heavy carpet on walls/ceiling for sound treatment and I'm just wondering a couple things...


1.) Should I face the drums towards a corner or towards the center of the room?

2.) If we play the guitars live with the drums, will the drum mics pick up the guitar noise? If so, how do we record the drums without picking up the guitar?

i know these are stupid questions but like i said I'm a newbie...
 
substance said:
2.) If we play the guitars live with the drums, will the drum mics pick up the guitar noise? If so, how do we record the drums without picking up the guitar?
Click to expand...

Yes, the drum mics will pick up the guitar sound (this is called bleed). If you're close micing the amp, you can minimize bleed by moving the amp into another room or a closet. Also, you'll want to use a dynamic for your amp in a situation like this to avoid drums bleeding onto the guitar track.
 
First,
-make a one track recording of everybody playing at the same time
-now everyone plays along with that track, and you record their "real" tracks
-drums first, bass second, whatever next
This is one way, I'm sure there are many others
Good Luck
In hIs Name
Big Kenny
 
Big Kenny said:
First,
-make a one track recording of everybody playing at the same time
-now everyone plays along with that track, and you record their "real" tracks
-drums first, bass second, whatever next
This is one way, I'm sure there are many others
Good Luck
In hIs Name
Big Kenny
Click to expand...

I'm thinking it would be very difficult for some drummers to play along with a previous recording of themselves, just like it's hard for many of them to play along with click tracks.
 
Re: re

substance said:
cool. thats what we were thinking of doing..

what about facing the drums towards the corner?
Click to expand...
Which one? The amp in the closet or the idea about playing along with a one track recording? I think the latter is a lot of hassle just to avoid a little bit of bleed. Bleed also can be a good thing, in small doses, helping the sound feel a little more cohesive and real.
 
re

so we should have the amps in the closet and have the drummer listen to them via headphone?

btw one amp will be miked, the other will be direct fed to mixer..
 
A lot depends on what facilities you have for headphone monitoring.

You could put down a scratch track of just guitar (it only need be acoustic), vocals and click from a metronome, making sure that you have at least 8 beats of click as lead in before you start playing, If it is possible, give both your drummer and bassist a headphone feed of this and get them used to playing with it. You can then track the drums and bass in one take without any worry about mic bleed. Then track your guitars with the guitarist listening through h/phones and then do your vocals although it may be wise to do rhythm guitar, the vocals, then lead guitar tracks.

Drum placement in that room is going to be a matter of experimentation. From what you have described I would imagine that the room will be bass heavy, so you could try pulling the curtains off one wall to get a bit more life there. I would suggest spending time tracking drums, (you don't need to do full songs, just have her play time, etc) and listen back to how it sounds, then move mics and/or the kit around and try again. KEEP A WRITTEN RECORD of each thing you do!!!

Amd don't forget to let me know when you put mp3's back up somewhere......preferably NoWhereRadio.com. :)

:cool:
 
re

thanks alot again! lots of good ideas..

hey aus i got a song of ours up at purevolume.com/substance


more to come!


nowhereradio.com is not taking new bands right now i guess.....
 
Let it bleed for Christ's sake!

Let bleed be your friend, the performance is much more important than the little bleed you get when recording a rock band.

When you record a jazz band in one room, that's what we call bleed! Listen to the upright bass, bleed!!!

Let the band play like they always do in the rehearsal room or on stage.

If you use a pair of SDC's for OH's, put them not too high and you will get very little guitar and bass bleed on the drums, plus the off axis response of SDC's can be very nice.

If you put a Beyer M69 or M88 in front of the guitar speaker, you won't hear almost no drums and bass on your guitar track.

Have the vocalist sing a scratch track in the control room and if needed, give the musicians the vocals on headphones.

Don't be afraid, a little bleed will do no harm and you don't need room mics.
 
Han,

That is all well and good, but in this instance there is no control room and mics and other gear may be somewhat limited.

Apart from that, they will probably learn more from doing it track by track than they will doing it in one take. It also leaves them with the option of re-tracking one part if they don't like the way it sounds.

Once drums and bass are down to a scratch track, everything else should fall into place......................then comes the fun of mixing:D .
 
Heya, Ausrock...

I like your suggestions in this thread.

If you don't mind, let me ask you something with a bit more detail to it...

I've only got 4 channels to track with.

For drums, I'm planning on a mic on the snare, one on the kick, and a pair of stereo overheads.

That's all 4 for me. Since I've only got the 4, if I record some scratch track for the real drums to be tracked to, what's the best way to handle this? Is it reliable enough to use an external sound source, (CD player, other suggestion,) with the drummer wearing phones, and get 4 tracks of drums. Then grab the bass, then the guitars, vox, etc...?

I'm just having a hard time figuring out how I'm going to grab what I want to grab so the drummer can hear a track to play to. Would I be better off having one overhead, and leaving a track open on the mixer for him to hear through that?

I'm a bit at a loss on how to approach this from a good starting point to get a decent go at it.

Thanks,

-Speedy
 
Hmmmmmmmmm..............................lol.:D

From the time I originally set up the "studio" I deliberately avoided having too few tracks, so I can't answer from experience.

I guess a couple of options are to try micing the kit with just o/heads and kick...........depending on the mics, careful placement should give you reasonable results. Then you have 1 trk spare for a scratch track or whatever. OR if you can get a metronome with a headphone out the drummer may be able to work to that.

Lateral thinking and a sense of adventure is required:D

:cool:
 
Speedy- If you have a headphone distribution amp, you can take the click track or scratch track from a CD player or cassette, whatever, and run it into the aux in of the headphone amp so you don't have to use one of your precious 4 tracks.-Richie
 
I've got a headphone amp on my wishlist at musiciansfriend.com, so hopefully that will be the next thing to come off of that list. ;)

In the mean time, I do have one other option.

I run everything into Cakewalk Pro Audio 9, with a Lexicon CORE sound card. It's got 4 ins, and 8 outs in the break out box.

What I can do, is throw the scratch tracks into cakewalk, and route it out of one of the outs into the headphone amp. That should work, right?

I haven't used my computer like that much yet, because, it's a pain to tear all the crap down, and set up, I'd rather just leave it all at home, and record to my yamaha mini disk. It's just much more portable. Plus, there's no fan noise that way.

Although, I have a feeling that when recording a rock band's drum kit, I'm not going to have to worry very much about a computer fan if I just keep it far enough away, and maybe put some sort of barrier up between them. ;)

I don't want to spend a ton of money on the amp, so I'm looking at the ART HeadAmp. It's only $50, hopefully it's decent enough that it will be worth going a little bit cheap on that piece of gear. I'd rather spend more money on a DMP 3 and the overheads that I need. ;)

Is there any reason why I absolutely should not buy the ART HeadAmp?
 
ausrock said:
Han,

That is all well and good, but in this instance there is no control room and mics and other gear may be somewhat limited.

Apart from that, they will probably learn more from doing it track by track than they will doing it in one take. It also leaves them with the option of re-tracking one part if they don't like the way it sounds.

Once drums and bass are down to a scratch track, everything else should fall into place......................then comes the fun of mixing:D .
Click to expand...

Well, it's fun for sure!:D

Remember, the Sgt Pepper album was done on 4 tracks.

I started with 4 tracks many moons ago and got awesome drumsound with just one RS PZM on the sweet spot.

Later I had a Yamaha 6 in 2 board and mixed the 4 drum mics (kick, snare and 2 OH's) to the 2 outs and got bass and guitar direct out to the other two tracks.

Made a mix to a 2 track, a 1/4" R to R, put the tape back on the Tascam 3440 four track and added the vocals to the other two tracks.

That was fun! Now my 17 year old son has a PC with an almost unlimited number of tracks in Nuendo, Cubase SX, Logic and more of that nice toys.
 
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