Check my drum room on this indiepowerpop tune

  • Thread starter Thread starter witulski
  • Start date Start date
W

witulski

New member
Hi folks, this is a feasibility test of a basement recording technique. No vocals yet, and guitars direct in for scratch-track purposes.



I'm most curious to hear what you think of how the drum sound is coming along.

RECORDING -
1-Shure Beta 52 (kick)
2-SM57 (snare)
3-SM81 (hat)
4-SM57 (tom)
5-SM57 (floor tom)
6 & 7-AKG C1000S (overhead)
Overheads placed pointing down above ride and main crash, about 6' high.
Performed in a basement with drop-ceiling tile about 7.5' high.

MIXING - Unsure of how our raw drum tracks might clean up, I brought them into Cubase SX and tweaked them a bit. On this mp3 you hear my results. I'm no pro yet, but I did make a lot of discoveries... I started by getting a foundation I liked between kick and bass guitar. Next I added compressed snare and gated it so that only the initial impact is heard and its decay comes more from overheads. Hi-hat I didn't tweak; it's barely in there anyway, just to add a little closeness and impact. Toms are my best boomy Cars approximation, also compressed and gated like the snare. Overheads are boosted in the highs (maybe too much - my ears are going) to focus on sizzle. The overheads are also compressed to make the crashes ring out longer.

Please comment away. I know it's a rough draft, but I'd appreciate it if anyone can tell me especially how much you can hear the room. It's a 15x42 parallel drywall basement with carpeted floor and a drop ceiling. I think I can hear it, but I can't tell if I'm imagining it. It just sounds... too "close"? Too "cramped"? "Confining"? Something like that. Or am I imagining it?

Also, does it sound too much like the drummer is using splash cymbals where nice heavy crashes should be?

Thanks.
Greg
 
sounds like you've got a good foundation, but here's some things:

1. the snare doesn't have enough snap to me. i can hear it when the drums solo break toward the end, but when the other instruments come in it goes back to being just a thwak.

2. the toms have no body. it's all stick-on-head noise. seems like they may be gated a little too heavily.

3. the kick drum is getting lost on my crappy computer speakers that can't reproduce the low bass. a little bell boost around 8K5 to 10K will bring out the beater click. sweep the eq around to find the sweet spot. put in a little, but stop before you think it's enough.

4. just for clality's sake, roll the hi-hat mike off below 500hz. it's not doing anything but going to possibly give you mud later on during mix-down. actually, if it was me i'd take the hi-hat mike and put it under the snare to get the "sizzle" of the snares. don't forget to flip the phase on the preamp/channel strip if you do that.

5. you asked about the room... i can't tell what kind of room it's in. it sounds very dry though.

keep it up! it's souding pretty good!
 
Alright! Thanks for the response!

1. During these recordings our drummer had a moon gel on his snare beater head... recently I asked him to take it off to give the drum more life, and he said he thought it sounded funny with it off. I agreed and asked him what could be causing it. We talked for days about spring tension, proper tuning, shell resonance, and then he casually mentions that the bottom head is cracked. AAGH!! So he went out and bought new heads this week and had the store tune the drum. I'm looking forward to recording with the new snare.

2. Mff.. Not sure what to do with the toms. Would I be finding this missing "body" in my 2-3"-from-top-head SM57s? Or should I be trying to dig it out from my overheads? Maybe a different close-mike technique like moving my mics to the bottoms? I guess I'm asking, is my mic setup sufficient to get body but I've just EQ'd badly?

3. Now that I think back to this recording, I think we started with a D112 in the kick but it sucked - I think it's broken. I'm pretty sure we ended up using a 58 in there instead. In my mixing experiment here I was doing my best to dig what sound I could out of that mic... since then I've gotten the Beta 52 and hit the mixer with it, and I couldn't believe the difference. That's a great microphone.

4. I'd like to mic the snare bottom, but I'm not sure if my Akai DPS16 has phase-reverse capabilities. The DPS12 didn't, and I confess I'm still using the DPS16 with the knowledge of a DPS12 user. Anyone know this?

5. Wow! I'm very excited to hear that you can't tell what kind of room it's in. I swear that was my biggest concern. Although now that you mention it's very 'dry', maybe that's what I'm hearing when I call it 'close', 'cramped', and 'confining'. I might have guessed a dry sound would suit this upbeat stop/start type music (i.e., you don't want a lot of reverb decaying all over the place during a full-band dynamic quarter-note rest), but maybe all the carpeting and tile and drywall killed a lot of the drum fun. I know I felt compelled to add some reverb to the snare in my mix, but backed off it a bit because it's kind of a clinical sounding cheap software plugin. We're going to be in a new room now though, and we have our choice of about three or four, so things might improve.

Thanks!
 
If anyone else checks it out, I'm curious to hear what you think of the dryness / room sound / closeness phenomenon. Maybe that carpeted drywalled basement with drop ceiling where we did this was just too dry for a nice sound?
 
57's are fine for toms it that's all you've got, although some people don't care for 'em. the md421 is of course a big favorite. also, 2-3" from the head isn't bad. where are the mics aimed? aiming them more toward the center is prefered. i dunno, it could be the drums themselves that sound like that...

in a close mic setup (as i'm sure you know) overheads should capture most of the sound of the kit, and the close mics are what define the individual drums.

okay, so back to the snare mic, if you can't mic the bottom, try micing the side of the snare. 6 to 12" away, aimed at the space between the upper and lower head... in other words, you are micing the shell of the drum. it's my favorite, especially when combined with a top and bottom mic.

now, on to the room. if you can build a small drum riser (4-6 inches) it will really help. if you can't go that far, throw a piece of 1/2" thick plywood down underneath the kit... just do whatever it takes to get it off of the carpet. this will change everything. okay, maybe not everything, but all of a sudden you'll be getting more snare snap in your overheads... because why? because the sound is no longer being absorbed from the bottom by the carpet. where are the snares? on the bottom. ahhhhhh.... light bulb.

i love it when a plan comes together. :)
 
The drums are nice and clean... I'll give you that. and the eq sounds pretty on. They are a little dry, though. For post-punk power-pop like this, I think you need a bit more of an arena sound. You're halfway to Poison, make it sound like you want to get laid. :-)

I have to be honest though, tuning your guitar would probably help more than anything.

It's a good song, overall. A couple of timing problems and I don't care for the tuning/intonation/scratchy distortion on the guitar.

Lot's of potential with a little work!

Just my opinion.

Thanks.
Piltdown Man
 
very cool

Wow.....I'd love it if my set sounded that clean...:(

I agree about the snare sound.........It sounds like its way to loose but I like a tight snare :)

The toms sound like they're in the next room though, but over all great sound.
I luv real drums.......


lata!
 
Its sure pretty dry and will give you room to manipulate from there in eq/effect/mix, but you could capture more tone without having to derive it by letting it breath just a bit more.
I like the plywood prompt for a slight touch of ambience and gel for the whole kit. The toms sound sorta flat like they have the dampeners a bit tight. The snare needs some more snap, yeah. Cymbals ok, just not sizzling. the kick needs abit more mids on it so its voice comes out a tad more, for me at least. Listen real close to that kick, do I hear pedal hardware being picked up?
 
This kind of intense 'drum clinic' is exactly what I need, and this board is like so golden.

I mean, we can go to an acoustic gig and listen to the drums, we can go to a small club and listen to the drums, a big club, and arena, and outside gig, and listen to the drums and we never really think twice about any of these situations, at least most of us don't.

And then we record drums, MIDI or real in our music and the world comes crashing down, because they don't sound 'real'.

Drums will kick your ass in the studio, that's for sure.
 
Alright! Thanks everyone, some really great responses here.

Today the drummer and I took kick/snare/crash to two fairly large concrete-walled rooms in his basement and my hardwood-floor 13x15 bedroom with its 10' ceiling. We recorded in each space. Very educational. Here's what I found:

Room mics are what I think I was looking for. Funny that the subject of this thread was "check out the room" and I didn't really even record it. I pulled out my first mics ever, a couple of '60s Sony dynamics that I inherited from a mentor, and laid them on the floor just for kicks. Mixing the experiments later this evening I found the sonic glue that had been missing from the kit. Incredible!

Now my brain is alive with rethinkings... one idea is to get rid of my AKG C1000s (I'm not sure AKG's don't suck - I replaced my D112 with a Beta 52 and it was the wisest mic choice I've made yet). I'm not really happy with the freq's the cymbals are showing through them and I think a matched pair of SM81s out a few feet would not only pick up the cymbals better but image the whole kit nicely, adding the glue that had been missing. Perhaps I'll even get some PZMs (I've always wanted some) and tape them up somewhere for extra room love.

I'm also thinking about dual-micing or side-micing the snare. That was a cool suggestion and its metal shell might be pretty snappy. I also am very excited about the wood-under-kit suggestion. That seems to have helped brighten things up a lot and added some real life to the kit.

Yeah, that's pedal hardware being picked up. I never would have heard it and I'm glad you pointed it out. I'll be inspecting the whole kit for hardware noise now. And yeah, we didn't bother tuning the guitars real well for the scratch track - my apologies to your ears.

Now I have to decide between a larger, stark, dank basement room or my own brightly lit, comfortable, warm and woody but small bedroom. The full-concrete basement sounds better when you just listen to the kit, we all agreed, but all that washy reverb might get in the way when the guitars are down. Actually, maybe the thing to do is go with the larger basement room just for the sheer size of it, but throw a couple plants and chairs and futons down there to tame the reverb decay without making it too dead. Plus make it less basement-y. Am I on the right track there?

Thanks for all the responses, I'll try to keep you posted on how it's going.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top