Drums in Stereo?

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El Barto

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Alright, here's the grand question...how would I go about record drums in stereo? This requires two tracks, one panned left, and one right. If I have 7 mics on the drums, and all the channels are panned left to record em all onto one track, how do I get them *ALL* on another track as well? It's pretty simple to do this with guitar...two mics on the amp, one left one right...but with drums? I'm not buying 14 mics, I know there has to be another way.
 
How many tracks can you devote to drums? At a minimum I use 4; kick in one, snare in two and the toms and overheads sub mixed as a stereo pair (even better is rack toms as a stereo pair and the overheads as another stereo pair using a total of six tracks). If you can only free up two tracks bus all the drum mics to these two tracks with the kick and snare panned up the middle and the rack toms and overheads panned from left to right. Personally I wouldn't pan them extremly left and right but something more like 9:00 to 3:00. This is just a matter of taste, your mileage may vary.
 
I'm hopefully getting this Tascam 688 (8 track), so I may have 4 tracks free for drums, but not definately.
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>If I have 7 mics on the drums, and all the channels are panned left to record em all onto one track, how do I get them *ALL* on another track as well? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

You pan them the way you want them to be panned, and record on two tracks simultaneously, one from the left channel and the other from the right channel. You don't have to pan dead left or dead right, you see...
Did this clear things up?

Wow. 7 mics... I've never recorded drums with more than 4 mikes. I'm currently going to try out doing it with just two, since thats as many good mics I have! :p
 
I've been wondering this: should you pan during tracking? Is it different from recording and then panning? I'm still a little unclear on that. Thanx.
 
OK, so how about this...I pan all the channels for drums hard left, and set 2 channels to record the left drums. Then on playback/mixdown, I pan one of the left channels to the right. Will that work?
 
Not if you want stereo. Pan them the way you want them to sound on the recording and record them into the computer that way (into two tracks).
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by El Barto:
OK, so how about this...I pan all the channels for drums hard left, and set 2 channels to record the left drums. Then on playback/mixdown, I pan one of the left channels to the right. Will that work?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

What you're talking about is NOT stereo, It's "dual Mono".
You can just record on 1 track and Track copy to another track if you're trying to put the exact same thing on both tracks-but it's a waste of the extra track as far as I'm concerned.

Stereo implies that there is possible movement (such as toms panned, highhat on the left, ride on the right, etc.)
What you're talking about will give you no perspective of this at all, because the exact same signal will be on two tracks.
So what you'd be creating is not "stereo" even though it would be coming out of both speakers.
Mono will come out of both speakers, if you pan it to the middle.
 
So basicly...if I record everything onto individual tracls (guitar on one, drums on another) and copy the tracks down onto the computer twice (so there's 2 of the same guitar, two of the same drums) onto left and right channels, it's dual mono? The only way to get stereo is to have different things in different channels? Please say yes, because it would clear everything up.
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by El Barto:
The only way to get stereo is to have different things in different channels? Please say yes, because it would clear everything up.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

BINGO!!
You've got it.
You have to think about it this way. If you have one guitar, plugged into one amp with one mic. It's all mono.

IF you could spare 3 tracks for the drums you can go two routes:
A Kick Track, A Snare Track, and 1 mono overhead/composite track.
Or a Kick and Snare composite, with a stereo composite tracks.

When dealing with 8 tracks, I always felt quality and flexablity of the sound with the drums was more important than "stereo".
I'm recording with digital 16 tracks -and I still use 1 kick track, 1 snare track, and 1 Compostie overhead track (Actually, it's just one mic 8 feet high, directly above the drumthrone.
My mixes have recently caused people at one of the Local "Pro" studios to speak to me about hiring me to engineer and produce for them. They were blown away by the drumsound-Hahaha, so much for Stereo!

If they meet the money I want, I'll do it-of course, I'll still keep doing stuff on my own.

Tim

Tim
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>IF you could spare 3 tracks for the drums you can go two routes:
A Kick Track, A Snare Track, and 1 mono overhead/composite track.
Or a Kick and Snare composite, with a stereo composite tracks.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

What exactly do you mean by "composite". Sorry if I sound so clueless...
 
"in my life" has the vocals panned hard right. The thing that was cool about that was my friends dad (semi-recording engineer) took the left channel out (the instruments) and kept the vocals. then his son (my friend) recorded a punk instrumental version of the song that had a faster pnkish rythm. and with a little tweaknig on Pro tools, the dad raised the speed of the voice (only the speed, not the pitch) so it would match the intsruments. It was like paul Mcartney singing a punk version of his song. Then my friend actually sent the tape to George Martin. no reply yet
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by El Barto:
What exactly do you mean by "composite". Sorry if I sound so clueless...<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

A Composite, is where. Okay-If you just use one overhead-it is picking up the entire drumkit. That's a Composite of the entire kit with 1 mic.

If you mic everything individually say 4 tom mics and 1 overhead, and send that to 1 track-that would be a composite of 5 sources.
Basically, you just put the rest of the set on 1 track.

This allows you to control the Kick and the snare levels against the rest of the drumkit.
By going this route-there's no "panning" of the toms, which alot of people seem to have a fetish about. I personally don't worry about it.

I mean, worry about your sound quality on tape first before you worry about panning.

Get the levels and sounds you want first, then if you want to pan-spare an extra track for doing it.

Remember-this is just how *I* do it, It's not written instone that you HAVE to pan Toms or whatever.

At one point in time, I was so worried about everything being "In Stereo" that I even bought K&K Sound's "Cymbal mic" ($35 each) and put one on every cymbal so that I could pan, eq, and add effects to each Cymbal separately!

You could pan your splash had left, have your Chinas panned hard wight-and have real true separation.
But It just got crazy, I had about a million cables I had to deal with whenever I would move the drumkit, and I just said ENOUGH!

So, I started working on a "less is more" approach-and I'm much happier with my drumkit. Of course, for some things-I'll do track replacement with my Sampler. If I'm recording something that's speed metal-I've got some awesome Kick samples that will cut through big time.

I completely embraced the whole Digital Drumming idea, but I went really overboard.
I've got a set of ddrum2's that I don't even use.They are just put away in my storage area. Those pads aren't that good anyway-but they were much better than everything else on the market at the time.

Tim
 
Thanks for all the advice, Tim. Makes perfect sense to me now. I had originally planned on micing each drum, then have 1 or 2 overheads. When I first thought of the concept of stereo, I always imagined HARD left or right...never slightly left or right. I always thought "Well what if someone doesn't have 2 speakers hooked up for some fucked up reason...they won't be able to hear half the drums!"
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by El Barto:
I always thought "Well what if someone doesn't have 2 speakers hooked up for some fucked up reason...they won't be able to hear half the drums!"<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Hehe, well, that kinda would happen if you just connect the left or right speaker. And it will happen in a slight way even with just slight panning. But luckily monosystems take both signals and mix them, so it ain't a problem.

Listen to Sergeant Pepper, for example. They panned everything hard on that album. The entire band in the right speaker and the singing in the left, and weird stuff like that. Stereo was new then, and I think they really hadn't figured out how to use it properly. It makes a VERY wierd experience if you listen to it in headphones! :)


[This message has been edited by regebro (edited 07-11-2000).]
 
Yeah, I noticed that :) Maybe that's where I kinda got the idea from.
 
OK- Here's a spinoff on the whole Stereo Drum question: I dont own any real "recording equipment" (as far as you consider 4-tracks and the like to be equipment). I own a computer with a regular ol' soundcard and a bunch of sound editing and multitrack software, and I also have a PA system that my band uses to amplify vocals during rehearsal/performance. The PA is a powered head.. so it doesnt have an independent mixer and all that kinda stuff.. just 4 inputs, some level controls.. a bit of an EQ and effects loops.

My question (now that you have all that info), is how can I make multitrack stereo drum recordings with this equipment..when the way I connect the PA to my computer mixes the tracks before they get to the computer... so at best I can produce a "dual mono" recording.(?) Is there any way to isolate each individual track (ie- snare, kick, overhead, etc) so they can be tinkered with separately on my computer? or am I screwed in that department?
 
You'd need a sound card with 4 to 8 inputs. If your mixer has channel inserts (some are labeled insert, some in/out)you can get the individual sends to the computer.
 
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