littledog said:
I have yet to have a single drummer rent a kit for a recording at my studio. They bring their own.
That's fine, as long as it sounds good. Not a lot of guys that come by here have great-sounding kits. Some do, and it's a treat to work with them, obviously. Living in a bigger city, sometimes I forget that not everyone is within shouting distance of a good rental shop. My bad.
But then again, I'm not chessrock, whose clients flock from far and wide just so they can learn the right way to select and play their instruments.
I wouldn't go that far.
I do get plenty who tell me they want their recordings to sound professional . . . with the best sound quality they can get, and sometimes that involves telling me they want the drums to sound great.
So I'll ask them about their kit and what it sounds like, how old and/or well-maintained it is, etc. If it sounds like they're not happy with it, then I tell them there's a place called Andy's music on the corner of Western and Belmont that has a pretty sizeable collection of rentals at a reasonable rate.
so what hands-on experience with my work are you referencing that enables you to blithely assume that you could get drum sounds that are far better than mine? Now, I'm not saying you can't (or that you can).
All I'm saying is that whichever of us has the better drummer on a given afternoon will probably wind up with the better-sounding drum tracks when all is said and done. That's all.
And if I happen to have a freakin' kick ass drummer with a nice kit come in this saturday, and you have Joe average with his so-so kit that does the job, then yes, I'll bet I can get better drum tracks than you come sunday.
At least on that particular week.
Let's just say if you are one of the world's great engineers, you are doing a good job staying incognito.
I've never really given that much thought -- as to where I would stand in comparison to others. I can say confidently that there are certain things where I can really shine but I wouldn't say that makes me one of the best in the world.
In the right situation, I'd at least call myself pretty useful.
it must be just awful for someone with such awesome gifts to be forced to hang out here and commune with people like kjarn22 who actually find recording a drum kit challenging.
Not really. There might be some things I could learn from him.
"I'm having trouble getting a good vocal sound..."
"I guess you haven't recorded any good vocalists lately"
Although I wouldn't exactly go to that extreme, there is at least a grain of truth to it that you can't deny. I just think a lot of us, myself included, tend to beat ourselves up a bit too much wondering what we're doing wrong or what gear we need to sink our money in to in order to sound like someone we hear on the radio or on a CD. And we forget there's a whole different side to this equation beyond our microphones and other gear.
So we get in this vicous cycle of researching gear and techniques, and we beat ourselves up over how to get a particular sound. Then we try and tinker more with what may not even be broken, and we spend even more money on gear that we might not even need.
Speaking of which . . . when I see how stocked your gear list is with all the big-name mic pres, and I muse at all of the money you must have spent on them -- not to mention your mic collection . . .
And then you mention that people have to bring in their own drums . . .
That tells me that you might have spent a little much in one area at the expense of another. Although I have no idea what kind of space limitations you might have -- which is a whole nother area you might have even been able to address with some of you mic pre fund come to think of it.
I'm also puzzled at how you seem to champion people whom you admire who aren't afraid to speak their minds. You excuse certain people's behavior based on the fact that "hey, this guy speaks his mind," and so on.
Yet, when someone like me has the gall to do the same, you have a problem with it. It really seems to irritate you that someone without a "respected name" in the industry can log on to a bbs and just throw out whatever is at the top of his mind and/or whatever he might be itching to say. Especially when some of it kind of makes sense sometimes.
Perhaps you find it threatening, or maybe you're a little envious that you, yourself, continue to put self-imposed limitations on what you can/can't say because you're so concerned with being politically correct all the time.
