kick drum recording

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Nathan1984

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So, I am doing some recording for this local band. I was doing drum tracks and I was just terribly disappointed in how the kick drum sounded. I always used ezdrummer, so I never had to mic a kit before. I got an EV 4 piece drum mic set, but I used a sm57 on the snare and an mxl 991 as an overhead. I made him take the res. head off his kick, and tried to get the kick mic as close to the batter head as humanly possible. The band is after a mastodon style metal sound. I want a good solid punch to the kick. I am doing the recordings in a...less than desirable place, so I couldn't really hear how my kick sounds when checking levels. I was running in the dark. My results ended up sounding way to bassy, boomy. I am thinking maybe put the resonant back on, and run my mic into the bass port? What do you guys think, how do you nail that perfect kick drum sound?
 
You put a 57 stupidly close to the beater and it was too bassy? I'm amazed!

It's not what you wana hear I'm sure, but the key is not to make the recording sound good,
it's to make the drum sound good, then record it.

Put the head back on, tune the drum, have some one play it while you listen in the room.

If the room's terrible, experiment with a tunnel maybe?


IDK, focus on the acoustic sound is the main bullet point.

I almost always have the kick mic in the same place. Out front, off centre.
The main contributions to how that sounds though are the real life sound of the drum and the choice of mic.
 
I wasn't using the sm57, I used an EV kick mic. I know that it isn't about making it sound good in the mix, I already knew that it better sound good going in if you want it to sound good in a mix. I was more or less wanting some tips on placement, and such. I want it to sound good going in. So you think that I better have him put the resonant head back on?
 
Oh, also, kick drum...on axis with beater, or off axis?
 
What I do is reso on...tuned (fairly) well. :o
The kik mic inside the shell about midway. I angle the mic toward the beater, not straight on.
If I want more boom, I'll pull it back. More click I'll push it closer.

That said tho, I've also gotten used to my subkick so I tend to have my mic closer for the click and get my boom from the sub.
 
Right on, that is what my plan was. Im not a total noob, I made damn sure those drums were tuned, sounding as good as they could, but I couldn't hear for crap with my headphones in a concrete building, literally, walls, floors, everything, so it was loud doing drum tracks. I don't have iso headphones yet, but that is on my list.
 
Good kick tone can take quite some work to get just the way you want. I do not want you to stray from finding a way to achieve a good 'real' kick, but in the mean time, you can use KT Drum Trigger (free) to use EZD kick to enhance what you have now.
 
kt drum trigger, what is it, like ss trigger and toontrack drumtracker? I was considering using one of the previously mentioned. I know that kick drums can really make or break your recording. I will definitely check this kt drum trigger out though, always helpful Jimmys69, thanks.
 
SS Trigger is far better than using the free KT Drum Trigger, but about $160 more expensive. KT sends a midi note from an audio track. You can trigger whatever VSTi.

You would copy your kik channel, insert KT, open EZD on another track and set its input to all MIDI (I think). Change the MIDI out of KT till it triggers the kick in EZD. Done.
 
Good, I was hoping you would explain it, looks like it could be complicated. I may end up getting ss trigger or drum tracker some day, and use it to blend an acoustic and sample together to make real thick kick sounds, I know alot of bands do that live...couldn't be bad on recording situations....??? lol
 
It's not really, all the filters and stuff make it look complicated. For a pretty much isolated drum like a kick, you do not need to mess with the filters so much. Just the trigger threshold. I used KT a bunch before I got the SSD. It works quite well really. Give me a shout if you have any problems.

I do however recommend continuing your quest for natural kick tone tho. There is nothing better than a good natural kick. Of course, there is not much worse than a bad one.
 
Nathan1984 said:
but I couldn't hear for crap with my headphones in a concrete building, literally, walls, floors, everything, so it was loud doing drum tracks.
Click to expand...

If you were tracking the drums in a concrete room with no treatment I can see a problem right there.
 
Could you give me a step by step to set up KT drum trigger? I use sonar 8 PE, I am alittle lost on how to use it. I have the drum tracks all set up, do I need to make a midi track for KT to input the midi signal? That is where I get lost, I know that KT is a plug in, so I put it in the kick drum track strip, but how do I get it to trigger ez drummer?
 
K, I am not familiar with Sonar, so things may be a bit different for selecting inputs. You just need to set EZD MIDI input to the output of KT.

In Cubase, I insert KT into the kick track. I then create an instrument track (EZD). I can now select 'KTDrumTrigger' as the MIDI input for the EZD track. I am not sure how you do that sort of thing in Sonar, but once you figure that out it should be easy. Once you have the input for EZD set as KT, open KT. Hit play. Set the threshold of Trigger 1 until the round balls show up on the graph (this shows it is triggering a MIDI note). Just pull the double line down till you get them. Set Drum1MIDIChannel to 1. Set Drum1MIDINoteNumber to 35 (kick in EZD). In Cubase, I have to click on 'monitor' to hear EZD play the notes. From there you can record the EZD MIDI.

Hope this helps.
 
yeah, I think I got an idea on how to do it, do you use a gate pre KT drum trigger?
 
That would depend on how much bleed you have going on. Essentially, the filters/threshold in KT is a fine tuning of a gate
 
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