Drum Mixing Techniques

  • Thread starter Thread starter MarvinG
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jimmys69 said:
Naw, the body of the text. Almost unreadable for me. :(
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Actually, that's aliasing. It's an interaction between the width/placement of the vertical lines of the text and the pixel size. You get the same sort of interaction between amplitude/time of a waveform when it's digitized. Either way it generates unwanted noise in the signal.
 
miroslav said:
Just so you know....the font is a minor concern, but that site has known malware on it and I'm seeing security blocks here at work because of it....so use at your own risk.
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Yeah, that's probably because it's free server. I'm aware of the issues with it. My site, however, was designed by myself and AFAIK there is nothing malicious loaded onto it.

Cheers :)
 
Thanks for the detailed input. I do almost the same, using Rode NT5's for overheads. Sometimes I do just one to avoid phase problems. However, since the drums are percussive and the bass is tonal, I usually mix the bass first, then use a parametric on the kick, sweeping to find where it crowds the bass guitar and notching it there until I can hear the bass. Usually the kick remains just fine. Most bass players actually are sensitive to the kick and try to stay away from the dominant frequency that they hear. When I talked to Ron Carter in NYC, he mentioned that the bass drum is an octave below the bass's lowest note, but that tones can interfere so he listens and tehn works around the one in every measure, often leaving the one out so the kick can hit it. Great thinking ensemble-wise. Good Luck,
Rod Norman, engineer

MarvinG said:
Hi everyone. I am running Shure 57s from snare and toms, Shure Beta 52 on kick, and two AT2020s as overheads into a PreSonus 1818 VSL, into an HP Pavilion laptop (will post specifics on the laptop later if required). I am using StudioOne Professional as DAW. Drums are Pearl Session Custom Maple. Paiste cymbals. Remo heads. Vic Firth sticks, wood tip, 7A American hickory. Room is basement with carpet floor, painted walls and ceilings. Low ceilings though, not much I can do about that.

I run separate compressors on the kick and snare, pan the overheads hard left/right, rack tom 15% left, floor tom 25% right, then run everything to a bus, which gets a bit more compression and EQ.

Also, I pull down 80hz (+/-10hz) about 1-2db on the bass guitar track to make a little more room for the kick drum.

The doubling of compressors (first on the tracks and then on the entire bus) helps to pop the drums out in my mixes without sticking way out there. I am OK with it but sometimes I feel like there is too much compression. It also creates a natural reverb, almost garage sounding quality, I assume all that compression is pulling the room dynamics out of the dead space.

How about you all? How do you mix your drum tracks to get them to pop in the mix without sticking out awkwardly in the mix? I want to hear the beat, the kick and the snare specifically, without it being unblended. Is the double compression the best way to go about doing this or is there something else I can be trying? I have tried NOT bussing my drum tracks and they really seem to get lost or I lose particular pieces of the kit as a whole. Thanks for considering my mixing technique described above (after reading the gear I am using). Please let me know if what I'm doing is the best way to go about it or if you have alternative mixing techniques.
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I have low ceilings. In the past I tried putting my overheads as high as possible then as far apart to follow the spacing height rules I read in a book (can't recall off the top of my head but something like 1/3 space to height). This always results in that splashy cymbal sound that I hear on so many bad home recordings. It is almost like a cupping sound. Can't really describe it, but I hear it on a lot of home recordings and never on professional recordings.

Anyway, after a few attempts at moving things around, I have discovered the best place for my overheads in my low space is actually on the sides of the kit, level with the cymbals, facing in toward the snare. No splooshy cymbal sound and no phasing.

So much for following the "rules."
 
MarvinG said:
Anyway, after a few attempts at moving things around, I have discovered the best place for my overheads in my low space is actually on the sides of the kit, level with the cymbals, facing in toward the snare. No splooshy cymbal sound and no phasing.
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There are a lot of engineers that place their overheads above the kit. You're right though - when you get that phased, comb filtered kind of sound and it's a problem (either from interaction with the room or other open mics on the kit) it's time to move the mics. There are some people that do this for a living that like to use something called a FOK mic, or "Front of Kit". Often it's a replacement for traditional overheads. Not so much because of artifacts in the recorded signal but because of what that collection point sounds like. Less of a sharp attack from the heads and cymbals and more of the shell tones. I think it works great if you have a well tuned kit with nice sounding shells.

One thing you might want to check with what you're doing is pan those 2 mics hard left and right. Check the centering of the kick and snare in the stereo image.
 
MarvinG said:
I have low ceilings. In the past I tried putting my overheads as high as possible then as far apart to follow the spacing height rules I read in a book (can't recall off the top of my head but something like 1/3 space to height). This always results in that splashy cymbal sound that I hear on so many bad home recordings. It is almost like a cupping sound. Can't really describe it, but I hear it on a lot of home recordings and never on professional recordings.

Anyway, after a few attempts at moving things around, I have discovered the best place for my overheads in my low space is actually on the sides of the kit, level with the cymbals, facing in toward the snare. No splooshy cymbal sound and no phasing.

So much for following the "rules."
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Have you tried absorption over the kit? Tame the reflection tame the effect.
 
I also found that by putting the "overheads" below the level of the cymbals, I got a much more balanced sound and no more of that dominating cymbal effect.
 
Is there a name for that cupped splooshy cymbal crash sound? I am positive it is a result of mics close to low ceiling picking up reflection of cymbals bounced back off the ceiling.
 
And here I started low'. :) My original rationale was ok, we got drums and a band' in a few smallish rooms. Not high ceiling (damit :p ) and I'll want some amount of isolation and control. I put the kit pair down into the gobos.
Expanded from there- As a basic starting point setup; Earthworks low about either side of the drummer, snare and kick mic.

The placement is far from perfect (can be a bit too close for the ride for example)
But typically it gets the shells' and kit fairly dry and tight, cymbals back some in the blend. And the cool thing is it sums -or images' really nicely from 100% pan all the way into mono.
If I keep the rest of the band at reasonable volume (and drummer no woose please, :D -what room and band leakage is just fine- useable actually. I try to keep guitars in the other room- but it's attached and wide open to the 'drum room. Bass lives on one side of one of the big gobos.

Add on's- have been FOK and an A/B pair out front and above a bit of the kit. They can play' anywhere from a bit of cymbal blend' to an alt takes on the kit..
Last hat/snare mic maybe.
So 4x6' gobobs on either side of the kit and movable ceiling clouds (lift up or down, tilt' to a little hut effect..) open front and rear of the kit, lately, facing into the other room. (used to have the whole thing 90 degrees rotated, 'tighter, perhaps better isolation, but less air' (rooms in it). Plus the visual cues! Things are way better when they can see each other!
Almost always have to do a bit of 4 to 7k bell bump on the drum bus with this setup.. Likely from the Earthworks' being 'primary in the mix I presume.
 
It can sometimes help to put the overheads right on the ceiling. Turns them into boundary mics or at least can move the phase cancellation up to frequencies which aren't quite so critical. Some folks like to put them on the floor out front also. I've had decent luck with various versions of the crotch mic, but it's kind of a specialized thing.
 
MarvinG said:
Ok I'm not alone!
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No, you are not.
I've actually evolved a weird drum miking set up. I have the three main toms close miked and each fed into their own channel in my mixer. Then I have a pair of small toms {one of my friends that's played drums with me for years has always called them 'concert toms'. I don't know what they're called !} each close miked and fed into a mic mixer which is then fed into a channel on the main mixer. Then each of my low overheads has it's own channel in the mixer. I pan the toms and overheads to taste in the mixer and then feed the left and right channels hard panned to two inputs in the DAW, the other two inputs take the snare on one, the kick in the other.
The reason I do that overhead/toms bit is for reinforcement and as stated earlier, to tame the cymbals. It took a while to get to this point, I kind of made it up as I went along but it works nicely for me.
 
ashcat_lt said:
It can sometimes help to put the overheads right on the ceiling. Turns them into boundary mics or at least can move the phase cancellation up to frequencies which aren't quite so critical. Some folks like to put them on the floor out front also. I've had decent luck with various versions of the crotch mic, but it's kind of a specialized thing.
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That's actually sounds (seems' I guess would be the term :>) like it could work. Maximizes your available height/distance, no short hot bounce' back into the mics.
The last time we got into 'SDC as boundary mics, re-reading the stuff at Crown- gaps = a high shelf loss, but hell eq'.
 
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