My drummer is really good but on recordings he never sounds great. He does not have a very expensive set but he has upgraded it a lot. He has a Tama swingstar drumset with sabain cymbals. He has upgraded the snares on his snare drum and replaced all the drum heads with evans. He has also stuffed the bass drum with acoustic dampening material. What should we do to make his set sound better in the studio?
Oh man. There are many reasons why a drummer might not sound good in the studio, and some of the reasons might have little to do with him.
EVERYTHING is in play here. I mean, if you put Matt Chamberlain in a tiny carpeted room, his drums are going to sound like shit, and he's one of the top drummers in the world. The space around the drums is just as critical as the drums themselves.
Then there's mic choice and placement. On "band" drummers in a great room, I sometimes spend most of the first day on the drums, whereas with Matt Chamberlain, JR, Keltner, or any other great drummer, I have tones in ten minutes flat. That's because band drummers tend to have less balance control over the kit. Overheads and hats are often hit far too aggressively, which causes problems for the recordist in trying to capture the kit, mostly because it starts out poorly balanced.
Mic choices and their placement will make a huge difference in the capture of the kit. U87s over the kit are completely different from C12s which are completely different form 451s. I'll use small condensers as overheads if I want to capture the aggregate of the kit from that position. I'll use large diaphragms as overheads if I'm looking to capture mostly cymbal information, and then I'll use the room mics to capture the aggregate of the kit. So, if you don't have an attentive recordist in the room with you, that could be your problem
Drum tuning will make a huge difference in recording a kit. An out of tune kit is going to sound like shit. Period. Great drummers know how to tune their drums, and when I get a drummer in the room that isn't particularly good at this I hire someone to do it.
Then, of course, there's mic pres and converters which also make a difference.
If you feel your drummer is kick ass, and he has good balance, then it's either a room issue or a recordist issue (and since the recordist selects the mics, we're going to lay blame on him for not using due diligence).
Mic placement is also critical. Drum kits can have 10 mics all within feet of each other. If those mics aren't placed well, there will be phase coherency issues that will totally fuck up the drum sound.
The heads that the drummer uses on his kit can also make a difference. White coated Ambassadors sound completely different from gel heads, and if your music calls for one and you're using the other, you might be having issues with the drum tones.
Stuffing the kik drum with deadening material isn't unusual, but if the kik drum sounds too dead, then you might want to adjust how much you put in. Further, a kik drum mic inside the kik is exceptionally unnatural sounding, and often sounds like a basketball. I often mic the kik drum from outside the shell, but if the drummer is exceptionally aggressive on the snare and/or cymbals, this can cause me to stick the damn thing inside the drum again, or build a tunnel over the mic so as to reduce the bleed from the rest of the drums. You might also wire up a woofer so that it terminates with a male XLR, and use that on the kik drum in conjunction with a mic in the shell. Be forewarned though: Be careful about how much of the speaker mic you buss with the other kik mic, or you risk blowing out your monitors.
Last but not least, compressors are a necessary part of a recordists tool kit (and a mixers) for dealing with a player lacking dynamic control and balance of his overall kit. The more problematic the drummer, the harder I'm going to hit compressors in order to make those drums sing. This can also be done in the mixing process, although I far prefer to get those drums sounding great right from the git, as it keeps clients (and me) from getting nervous.
Since you're at the mixing stage on this project, the best advice I can give you is to get a good mixer that understands how to use compressors (particularly hardware ones). You can also pick up my book Zen and the Art of Mixing if you're attempting to mix this yourself, as it provides quite a bit of useful information in this regard.
Hope that helps.
Enjoy,
Mixerman
