How many drummers does it take to screw in a lightbulb...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fmmahoganyrush
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I am just messin' with ya all. There really is no caustic attitude over here.
I know the pain of miking drumsets. I just started all of that myself. I could not make
noise in my previous Chicago studio, and I recorded with an electric set so that I would
not be evicted.

This is the kind of hostility you get when you are carrying drums and one too many
people ask "don't ya wish ya played piccolo??" after the sax player runs off with the
girl after the gig and his 40 second packing routine. Piccolo sucks.

Miking Drums:
So, now I have a Shure 57s on the snare and toms and a Shure bass drum mike on the kick.
I've recorded and I think that overhheads would be a good idea. Anyone have reccomendations for
drum overhead mikes ??

If possible I would like to have condensors that I could use for other things I do esp. Vocals.
 
Fmmahoganyrush,

I never really used acid (the software) but that might work. The problem is resynching to your existing song. There are tricks for this in cakewalk but they might not work the greatest. I usually create my loops as part of the compositional process itself then I do what you said and drop a .wav into cake as one track or arrange the separate loops in cake depending on what I'm doing (the latter is more time consuming but it's easier to tweak the track later on.) If your track was on a solid click (such as 96.0 bpm and not some fraction like 96.34) in cakewalk to begin with this will be easier because most software will synch to it perfectly. You may want to talk to acid users (go to a Phish concert, um ... heh) because I think there's a lot more that does which can help you and I am unqualified to discuss it.
 
Voxvendor's Method:.... I mic my snare, and make 3-4 samples, of a few different hits... But not too different.. When I sequence the samples, and combine them, I still want it to sound like a live drummer sitting there.. Not just a bunch of different drum samples sequenced..... Play live cymbals. live hi hat.. (All seperate, so you don't get any bleeding).. Use a bass drum sample that you like, and incorporate it in the beat, with 2 slightly different volumes, but not enough difference that a person listening will here that you used 2 different volumes of the same sample.....The whole philosophy to this is, Keep in mind that drummers are human, and have a certain touch to things. No drummer in the world hits the exact same way, at the exact same strength EVERY time (which is why a drum machine sounds fake).... Add some varience, and you will surely trick your listeners, into thinking you rented Neil. Sampling is easy, and cheap... So don't think you need some $4000 rig.... I use an old Ensoniq EPS-16... which I bought used for somewhere in the area of $500. It sounds great... And sampling is as easy as pressing two (well labeled) buttons.........Joe
 
Ok, Drink a whole bottle of scotch, then do your programming, It will surely be Keith Moon-esque:)
 
why make fun of drummers? drummers kick ass!! we've got the coolest looking instrument on stage, and can improv like crazy. i love making up cool sounding fills on the spot. cant do that with a guitar can ya? its ok, i have nothing against you guitar folk, i just hate people dissin us drummers. drums, oldest instrument in the world.
 
Good points, all. The other thing to remember is that the feel of a drum part owes almost as much to subtle dynamic variations as it does to the subtle variations in timing that everyone expects.

I've always been a drummer (although I have picked up a few other instruments over the years) and lately I've been e-drumming: tracking my e-kit to MIDI as often as I do to audio tracks. It's been interesting looking at the MIDI data for some of my best tracks, and doing a little analysis of where the punch comes from. IMNSHO, the thing that *truly* kills the feel of a machine-generated track is the dynamic sameness: not every hit is at v=127, and not every 4-bar phrase repeats at the same exact dynamic levels.

Personal opinion follows: this is also a problem I have with most loop-based music. The punch of the drum part often doesn't get a chance to breathe with the ensemble phrasing, as it would with a real drummer sweating in the room with everybody else. I can play a track, quantize it to sixteenths, and it will still have a remarkable level of humanity left, just from the dynamic variations within the context of the song. There's not as much as there would be from allowing things to be placed in front or in back of the beat where they belong, of course, but it's a damned sight better than the Dr. Rhythm sitting there going boom-chick with every freakin' hit at 127...

If your sequencing software allows you to, try really playing with the dynamics of the drum parts. Even if you're square on the beat, you'll find some useful things there. This is critical for fills, and for riffing on the snare: moving accents around is the key to the art.

One other thing: for rock, consider layering crash cymbals. Sampled and electronic crashes usually sound pretty thin and hideously monochromatic, without a lot of work done in post. However, most non-drummers seem to miss the fact that real drummers accent on crashes not just by hitting them harder (they break, and they're expensive!), but by either hitting two of 'em at once, or a crash and a splash together, or leading into a crash with a splash on the pickup, or stomping the bejeezus out of the hat pedal right at the attack for that extra "chup" to get a different attack feel, or doing a heel-kick on the hat to get a wide-open hat sound with the foot (keeping the hands free for fills or brass work) to decay with the crashes... Whatever. Not only do these techniques give you *more* sound, but the two cymbal samples decaying together will often provide a timbre that is much more real-feeling.

Just remember this: when a drummer is getting dug in on a part and the sweat is flying, the accents do not come from a single instrument in the kit, any more than they come from a single string or a single key for guitar or keys. How do you program that? By learning the feel of the instrument, just as you had to learn your chosen axe: listen surgically, and figure out what's going on in there.

Just make sure that the total number of objects being hit at any moment is plausible- which means that you *may* need to sample the sound of the throne falling over for that big power-chord ending... (;-)

Or unless you wanna sound like Dave Weckl. But that's another post.
 
i love making up cool sounding fills on the spot. cant do that with a guitar can ya?
Click to expand...

Im not making fun of drums, in fact I love playing drums. But you CAN improvise fills with a guitar, it is quite common.
 
How many lead vocalists does it take to change a lightbulb?One,he holds on to it and the universe revolves around him.
Did you hear about the bass player who locked his keys in the car?It took him an hour to get the drummer out.

I do drum machine tracks freehand with quantize off,one track at a time.Keep the patterns simple.Change from ride to hat with the section changes.The "sizzle" on cymbal samples can often sound funny.Cowbells,triangle and latin perc. makes good substitutes.

Tom
 
What do you call someone that likes to hang around with musicians? A Drummer!!
 
WTF Guys? I started this post because I had a question on getting a resonable (or at least better than what I'm getting now) sounding drum track utilizing some sort of sequencing software, and named the post in a manner that I thought would get some attention. It's a F#^king Joke, OK? Didn't mean to dis any drummers out there. Aside from the current flame war going on, I would like to thank everyone for their suggestions. I've been looking into, sampling, looping etc. Although there is a learning curve, I have had some interesting results with the stuff I'm screwing around with. Peace, Tom.
 
Take all the time you'll waste recording drums seperately and learning how to program crappy samples and learn how to play a few beats!......Or maybe not.......................Anybody got a bloody mary? This thread is giving me a bad hangover.
 
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