First Crack At Recording Drums

[Bulls Hit]

If you've only got 4 tracks I wouldn't worry about the tom mics. Definitely don't mic them with the overhead tracks. You should be able to get an excellent sound from kick, snare & oheads.

I'd leave the faders on zero, and adjust the gain so you get a reasonable level. Avoid clipping at all costs, err on the side of caution when setting each gain

 

[nk126]

A New Experiment

Left home alone for a morning I pulled out the Slingerland snare that sounded so dead on those first recordings. It sounds much much better to my ears live than it did on that first recording, so I got curious.

I dug out a mic, a snare stand, and a few drums. Ran the mic (radio shack clip-on tom mic) direct into my mac via a xlr->1/4" cable, 1/4" to 1/8" mono adaptor, and a MacAlly USB audio interface. Definitely not the way to go to preserve audio quality, but the best I could do at home this morning.

Tried recording short samples of a few different drums. One thing to note is that the room I did this in is a much livelier room than the studio where I did the first batch of recordings -- this room is the office/2nd bedroom in my apartment, and has hardwood floor with an area rug in the middle, two desks, a few chairs, and several bookcases full of books. Not much in the way of big, thick, muffling type materials.

The drums are the same 14 x 5 slingerland snare, 12 x 4 aux snare, and 10" tom from the previous recording. Also tried my 14 x 5 ludwig acrolite. Everything was close-mic'd with the clip-on mic, and I tried each drum twice - with the mic pointed just inside the rim and also with it pointed towards the center of the head.

No EQ or effects or anything on the recordings. Just one mono track recorded to AIFF and converted to 160k mp3.

Anyway, here's what I got:

Thoughts?

cheers
nk

 

[nk126]

So a few months, a firewire mixer, and a bunch of jams later, here's more attempts. Been using a kick mic, snare mic, and overheads in an x/y pattern. One of the recordings also has tom mics. Generally, we don't spend enough time checking levels since once we get setup we just want to rawk. The newest recording ("blackberries must die" - top-most on the page) is through the bassist's ProTools 002 board and also features my new snare, a 13 x 7 10-ply maple I had made for me. Tuned up real high, nice and crisp and funky. Kick could be louder on these newest tapes:

http://www.threebase.com/spymix/index.html

Cheers,
nk

 

[lpkyer]

Hey dude I love the songs!!! The recording is all good, seriously! Keep it up.
And tell me about the firewire mixer? Is it better than expected?

 

[nk126]

Hey dude I love the songs!!! The recording is all good, seriously! Keep it up.
And tell me about the firewire mixer? Is it better than expected?

Thanks, man -- much appreciated.

So I got a Phonic Firewire mixer -- I write for a website and got it as a review unit to test out. It's the top of the line one, does 16 channels in including 8 preamps with phantom. Has a bunch of digital effects built in, etc. All I've used it for so far is the recording interface capabilities. And I'm ashamed to say, but we've yet to really set it up properly in terms of soundchecking every input and trimming levels for optimal signals. :-(

The mixer is pretty cool so far, though when my bassist brought in his ProTools 002 setup I got *very* jealous. The mixer works as advertised and is basically plug and play with my Mac (iBook G4, OS X 10.4) -- shows up in the coreaudio control panel and in the I/O options panels of my software. Can run 16 separate channels and one stereo mix channel of input and one stereo mix channel back as output for monitoring from the board. Once the board is plugged in and turned on, I get all 16 channels as options -- using Ableton Live as my DAW, I can record individual tracks and/or stereo pairs (1/2, 3/4, and so on).

We've run up to 10 channels, I think, at once for recording -- 7 channels of drums, one bass, one stereo guitar feed, and one stereo drum machine feed.

I've had some issues with digital distortion, but I think they might have more to do with a bad firewire cable than with the board. Not sure -- haven't had a chance to do any real testing, but I definitely had some issues one night that seemed to be at least somewhat attributable to that cable. I run the board into my Mac and an external firewire drive into the board's second firewire port (only one FW port on my Mac).

The recording on the 002 setup came out sounding better overall than any of the ones on the Phonic, but the Phonic still sounds pretty good. Some of that is because we took more time to set up and level check the time we used the 002 -- when I bring my board, I first have to set up my drumkit, then the drum mics, then the board and laptop. By then, everyone's been waiting for me. When the bassist brought his board, he was into checking levels by the time I was finished setting up my drums (I use a few electronics with my acoustics, so it takes a minute or two to set up). Anyway, we did a better job of "engineering" that session.

Also, though, the 002 has better preamps and better build quality throughout. Of course, it also sells for around $2200 instead of the $500 or so the Phonic goes for. That being said, the Phonic board feels pretty solid in general. Like I said, I've yet to use it as a stand-alone mixer.

I'll tell you, though, for $500 or 600 for this (or an Alesis), I'd strongly consider saving up a few more bucks for the $1000 M-Audio ProjectMix I/O board. Seeing the way the 002 can function as an automated control strip for mixing after recording made me realize how handy that kind of stuff can be. With my setup, all of the mixing is done via keyboard and mouse -- once the recording's over, the Phonic board gets put away.

But I'm not complaining -- having a 16 channel digital recorder is pretty awesome