sure...
You mean recording...
I guess so.
Well, first me set up the mics around drums and fiddle around with them, eq and movable pieces of walls.
We usually have 7-12 mics around drums, and sum them up to 6-8 tracks.
The usual track list:
1. Kick drum, Shure B52. Halfway inside the drum, pointing at the beater.
2. Snare, SM57. Try several positions while the tape is running to minimize the hi hat bleed and to get the desired balance between attack and ring. (Attack=center of the batter head, ring=edge)
3. Under the snare.
4,5,(sometimes6 too). Toms.
6.7. Overheads. Play with the height to get the desired balance between room sound and the direct sound.
(8.9) Overheads#2, try different mics in same positions, or in different places, like several feet away....
Then we try to find a drum sound that we´re happy with. Never happened.
Guitar is usually the next step. Sometimes I play a "helper" guitar while we´re recording the drums, so we would remeber where are we going, usually thru a Pod or amp sitting next to me in the record booth. (Drums are in another room.)
The real guitar tracks require an amp, I´ve never liked the Pod sound. I just throw a SM57 right in front of the amp about 5cm´s away, and it sounds great. Then, every single time, someone kicks the mic or something and the position changes, and we can´t get it to sound good again, no matter how I try to put the mic back where it was.
I always double track the distorted guitars, sometimes even quadruple them.
Then the bass thru a D.I box or
BassPod, and maybe some synths. Then vocals....
Then, the last and most upsetting part, the mix... I use a PC, Logic Audio, and several plugins. My favorite compressor is the Waves RCL, just sounds best. I tinker with the songs for a long time, automate everything, clean every track from useless crap etc... For example, for this song I edited the tom tracks so that there is nothing but silence when they´re not played. Just use some audio edit program and cut everything between the tom hits. Then you can delete the useless data and save about 30mb per song. But the bigger advantage is that you can edit the tom sound like there´s no tomorrow. Just listen to that tom sound on the Farewell... Not very natural, eh? I used radical eq, a pitch shifter (with 50% mix, so it doubles the tom sound with a 3semitone lower one) and a reverb.
I really overshoot the toms, so that the come through the mix... Examples of this sound: (listen with headphones)
http://koti.mbnet.fi/~fisq/mp3/Rummut.mp3- Few seconds of Farewell-drums alone.
- Same place with a full mix. (Notice the Cher-effect in the end
- Intro from another song. This tom sound is just an effect for the intro, not everywhere in the song.
Backwards cymbal, backwards reverb with a flanger in the first phrase of the vocals... (oh dear, how much tweaking everywhere...
I like that big reverb on the toms and snare... Notice as the reverb time&volume on the snare change to fill the pause point.
