drum compression

  • Thread starter Thread starter omtayslick
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omtayslick

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Any general advice, starting points, or favorite settings for compressing stereo drum tracks? I am getting into recording drums for the first time. Not booming in your face type rock drums, but recording a standard kit to support acoustic guitar oriented music.

Thanks.
 
How 'bout some more info? What are you working with, are you compressing while tracking, after, with plugin's? For seperate drums or a premixed mixed kit?
Wayne
 
For that kind of drum sound:

If your useing room mics and overheads then you can compress the hell out of the the snare (by turning the ratio all the way to the right, the tresh. down to a little under half-way and the gain up a little that normal. Then turn the snare mic down. With the room and over head mics blending in with the compressed snare mic, you will have a nice "snappy" snare, and you can control the volume if it gets to loud.
 
I am recording the whole kit in stereo with 2 ecm8000's. (limitations of my set up) I usually do acoustic guitar based stuff a track or two at a time, so drums are new to me. I seem to be capturing the whole kit with these omni's, but they need some compression to punch through. I am processing after the fact with plug-ins. Also would be interested in what frequencies various drums reside at, so that I can do a little tweaking there as well.

Thank you.
 
Try not to use eq until you have too. mess around with mic placement until you get the sound that you want. Then if you can't find the sweet spot with mic placement, use the eq. Good freq can be at: 60-80hz(boosting), 1-4khz(boosting) and 10khz (boosting)but don't go wild with the eq. try it little by little. you don't want to over eq and distort the natural sound.


Z
 
Thanks for the replies. Do you think it's possible to get a good drum sound using only 2 mics, or am I wasting my time?
 
It is possible to get a good drum sound out of two mics. Even if you use 10 mics to mic drums they're going to end up on 2 tracks in the end. You just have to mess around with placement more before you record.
 
It's possible to get a good drum sound with one mic but I wouldn't use an ECM. They are just too flat sounding.

It's hard to recomend compression settings because all compressors and tracks behave differently.
 
TexRoadkill said:
I wouldn't use an ECM. They are just too flat sounding.
Click to expand...

The resion for that is that Behringer did not design the Ecm to be used as a recording mic. (although people have come to use it that way) the Ecm was design for use with the Behringer Ultra-Graph pro. You plug it into the back mic input for use with the Pink Noise system on the Ultra Graph Pro.

Z
 
I think there can be a pretty good trade off, using a decent flat, fast mic and a bit of eq. The eq can be taylored, and is a known variable.
I've never heard these, but use Earthworks -sort of a similar starting point. I could want a mic that is a bit brighter at times, but with almost any mic, I expect there would still be times when you need to plug in the eq and do some fixes.

YM(will)Vary (no matter what)
:D
Wayne
 
Thanks for the opinions. I used the ecm's as they are omni, to pick up the whole kit. After some care with placement, and experimenting with EQ, I have arrived at a decent sound. The ecm's picked up everything fine but were a little dull on the snare and toms. The EQ helped me to balance the sound and fix some deficiencies with the snare and toms. Just took a little time, and interestingly enough, now that I've got it EQ'd well, I don't seem to need the compression to tie it all together.
 
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