drum recording

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bunnyfunk

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My drummer is ready to drop some good cash on stuff to record drums, but we are at a loss of what we need besides the microphones. We also are unsure of exactly what path every thing has to take. We have a minidisk four trak and a mixing board. Basically, I know that we mic the drums and go to the four trak, but what comes in between? I know that we should use some sort of compression, but where? How exactly do we want to connect the compression to use with eight microphones? We understand all the basics of recording, but are just learning about recording the drums. Any advice is appreciated!
 
Try to isolate as much as you can by micing each part of the drum ( Kick,Snare,Toms,Hihat, Overheads and if you have enough mics get some ambiance of the room.

Hook all this to your mixer. From here you have several options.

You can submix and print to 4 track with effect-processors
Or sub mix and then on the 4 track process.

In general I would follow this
1. Gate
2. Eq
3.compress
4. Reverb

All this can be done via the mixer using sends returns, Aux
etc....
 
If you have a "channel insert" in your mixer you can compress that specific channel.
A effects bus ( Aux ) is more for sending a mix from the bus to a effect where the output is sent to a open channel in the mixer or the effects return.
This is more for reverbs and so.

The compression shoud be sent through the channel insert.

It's most commen to compress seperately.
I'll try to give you a basic idea on how you can work with the seperate parts although it can change from style to style.

Kick
====
EQ-between 200 and 600Hz is the cloudy part of the kick
Try to turn down sme of the low mids.Boost a little at 75-150Hz for a low power thump then boost between 3k-5kHz for definition, attack.

GATE- to isolate the track. Set the attack to a fast and start the release time for 1/2 a sec and continue from here.

Effects -I know of some people that use reverb but most don't. I like it dry but you can add a little gated reverb.

PAN- center

Snare
=====
EQ - I roll off 100Hz - not really needed. Boost around 250Hz for body and 5kHz for more attack.

GATE - to isolate
Compression- this will even out you levels and can help give your snare a bitting sound.
Always place the gate before the compressor.

Reverb - very important !. It's actully commen to use more then 1 reverb on a snare but if your low on reverbs just play around with your effect. For ballads longer reverbs
for other styles try a gated reverb or a hall.

Panning -Center

TOMS
====
Reverb- try to use the same reverb from snare
EQ- often cloudy around lower mids. Roll off 100Hz. attack - bost 3-5kHz
Panning- from 10 to 12 oclock.

Hihat- I mic it if it's an important part of the groove.
No reverb

Overheads -blend them in enought to fill the sound of the kit and cymbals.

In general it's also good sometimes to have leakage in you sound from the other mics to make the drums sound smooth and gateing overdone can somtimes make the drums sound unnatural and although gateing and isolating will help you get a power sound don't worry about a little leakage on Toms and use overheads and ambiance mics to smooth it out.

Hope this helps. I'm sure other people have different opinions.
Most important - It's hard to give a suggestion without hearing the room the tunning of the drums knowing the mics and there placement your equipment, your style etc... etc..
And so I would take anything I wrote as a starting point.
You take it from there to your needs !.


[This message has been edited by Shailat (edited 12-30-1999).]
 
Thanks for the tips shailat. One more qustion, can I run compression through my aux sends and returns? Some one told me that compression through the returns was defeating the purpose, which caused me some confusion on how I could compress more than one source without buying alot of compressors. Which drums do I want to compress? and which drums would I put reverb on? Also, would I gate every mic?
 
The only way to compress mulitple sounds with one compressor is to asign those channels to a sub group and not to the main mix and use the compressor on that sub group.
 
shailat, your time and advice are greatly appreciated! I think that this will get us headed in the right direction.
 
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