My first live recordings - a journey

T

TonyPDHM

New member
Hi all

I've been reading a lot of the threads on here and as you seem to be a helpful and enthusiastic bunch I thought I introduce myself and explain what I'm trying to do with my band.

My band plays metal, we've shelled out too much cash in the past on pro recordings which we've always been dissapointed with, so before we do that again, we'll be making our own "pre-production" CD. Who knows, it might even be good enough as a product (but I'm not holding my breath). We are:

Ali - Vocal (screamy/shouty a la Pantera)
Stu - Vocals (singy a la Life Of Agony)
Lee - Lead guitar
Tony (me) - Bass guitar
Rich - Drums

Tonight we're due to set up the drum kit at Rich's work after hours, and try to get some good sounding drum takes over the next couple of days. We will be using my BR1600CD which can record eight tracks at once, a cheap set of drum mics (4 x AKG D440's and an AKG 550), plus an assortment of live vocal mics which we'll try and use as overheads. Ah yes, and we have no stands

Before you panic, this is just the beginning. We have all the time in the world and I'm prepared to spend money where it's warrented. Mic stands are most definitely on the agenda.
 
part 2 (of part 1)

So this will be our drummers first time playing to a click, his first time recording without the looming threat of studio bills and ticking clocks, and my first time micing anything... could be interesting.

I thought of a plan yesterday while reading a huuuuge thread on here from Black Aspirin about source sounds vs mics and positioning. I would imagine that source sound for an acoustic instrument like drums is all important. Surely if the drums sound cack I wouldn't be able to polish the proverbial turd, so we are going to spend a wee while making the drums sound good in the room (or at least tuned...). THEN (and here is the cunning plan bit) I'm gonna grab eight mics and mic the kick drum in eight different ways, have the drum monkey bash the whole kit for a while an tape it onto eight tracks. Then listening to each track individually I'll get a good idea of which track has the best seperation from the rest of the kit and the best sound.

Can any of you audio heads see any glaring oversights with this?
 
part 3 (of part 1)

From what I understand, phasing is only a problem if you intend to actually use more than one track of the same thing in the final mix. Is that correct?

If this approach works I'll try similar things to get good sounds and seperation from the snare, toms, and cymbals too.

I have a sneaking suspicion that consistence of snare and kick sounds will be a problem. Rich tends to leather the snare skin all over... we'll see.

So, apart from the "eight tracks of kick drum" idea I'm not really asking for any advise. Yet. As soon as I run into any problems you'll be the first to know.

Cheers all
Tony

ps - apologies for the split post, but I was unable to post the whole thing in one shot. If there's a character limit I wasn't getting any warnings about it...
 
Tony, my band finished recording the drums for our upcoming album about 6 weeks ago. We used the same Boss hard disk unit for tracking, and we had 9 mics in total (2 summed into track 1 for the double kick drums).

1 - kick (2x Sure Beta 52)
2 - snare (SM 57)
3 - overhead left (SD condensor hung vertically over the LH cymbals)
4 - "overhead" center (SP B1 in front of the kit)
5 - overhead right (same mic as track 3)
6 - tom panned 9:00 (cheap Audix clip-on mic)
7 - tom panned 11:00 (cheap Audix clip-on mic)
8 - tom panned 1:00 (cheap Audix clip-on mic)

Floor tom and additional 4 smaller toms were not mic'd. Track 4 happened just on a whim, but what a difference! It really picked up the snap and shimmer of the splash cymbal and was conveniently equidistant from both cable hi-hats and picked them up beautifully too. It really helped "un-dull" the small cymbal work and brightened the whole sound tremendously.

This was also the first time that our drummer had recorded to a click. It would have helped immensely if this were not the case, as I've spent the last 6 weeks stretching and splicing in Sonar to get things relatively quantized. I made a big error when preparing the click tracks, and that was using a beep-style metronome instead of a thud or a true click. I thought a couple different beep sounds would help him identify with the first beat of each measure, as alot of our stuff has odd-time signatures. Because he plays so loud, we had to crank his headphones ridiculously loud, and in some cases, it actually bled, very quietly, into the overheads. It's noticeable during sparse passages where there are no cymbals ringing and when he's slightly late. If I had used a click or a thump, it wouldn't have been so noticeable. I think I can gate it out when I do the final drum track mix down, but an unnecessary annoyance that I'll avoid next time.

Anyways, for me, phase issues were basically a non-issue. The center mic was set up equi-distant from the kicks and snare, and the same rule was used to match it with the other overheads so they were all the same distances. When assembling the tracks later, I had to move the center overhead ever so slightly back to keep it in phase with the others, but very little. The tom tracks had to be moved back and forth, because the sound arrives there earlier as they were close mic'd, but otherwise I found that the whole process was relatively phase-issue free. Watch the snare though, it dominates the OH tracks, and makes Track 2 virtually useless. If you do use track 2 (which is handy if you want to use a drum replacer or use it to drive a snare-only reverb effect to add depth without messing with the rest of the kit), you have to move it in time back a bit to match with the OH's.
 
After day 1

Hey there HollowMan (Entombed fan?)

We ended up not trying different mic placement really as we ran short of time. Rich had to work later than expected and the kit/stands/mics to too long to set up. We tracked only about 20mins worth of takes, but from that we were able to solve a few problems we ran into and spend enough time EQing each track to get it sounding pretty good (by my standards).

Here's what we ended up with:

1 - Kick - AKG D550 inside the shell on some rolled-up towels
2 - Snare - AKG D440 clipped to the rim
3 - Rack tom - AKG D440 clipped to the rim
4 - Floor tom - AKG D440 clipped to the rim
5 - Overhead 1 - Shure SM58 Beta vertically 2ft above left cymbals
6 - Overhead 2 - Shure SM58 Beta vertically 2ft above right cymbals
7 - Back - Shure SM58 horizontally at knee height 10ft behind
8 - Front - Shure SM58 horizontally at knee height 10ft in front

We got the input levels, tracked a bit, and the whole thing sounded like suck before we got EQing. Bearing in mind we weren't using any of the multi effects you can use to record with, it was all just raw. Is it normal for it to sound crap to start with? Or should you be able to get a fairly decent "kick" on the kick drum from scratch (for instance)?

Once we'd EQd stuff we got a fairly decent sound, but if other people are able to get a good sounding "raw" starting point I'd love to know how to approach that myself.


The problems we had:

Very wooly sounding kick drum, just not kicking enough.

Strange "finger-clicking" sounds (turned out to be a cymbal hitting a tom mic... took us three takes to work that one out. Ahem).

Building boom stands for the overheads from broom handles and paint roller extensions.

Getting the drum machine to play anything like loud enough for Rich to use as a click.

The snare being too loud and peaking the input even with the input knob on zero.

Getting the "level calibration" button to work consistently well on auto.

Getting Rich to hit the kick and snare consistently.


The good stuff:

Having a lot of fun.

Getting a better than expected overall sound for the first attempt.

Like HollowMan's experience - The front and back mics put up as an afterthought. The tracks from these are very live and bright, and from initial hearing can be used almost as a reverb level for the whole kit.


The recorder was set up only about 5ft in front of the kit and Rich is a very heavy hitter, so trying to EQ anything while he was playing was pointless. Will the proximity of the recorder to the drums cause any problems? I didn't notice any, but then I wouldn't know what to listen for.

Also, phasing. With the set up listed above, should I expect any? What would it sound like?

Oh, and HollowMan. I won't be doing any moving tracks/sections back and forth by 0.1ms as all I'm using is the BR1600Cd (at the moment at least). Unless it has that kind of facility which I haven't stumbled across yet...

Tonight we'll be tracking a lot more as the kit and mics and recorder are still set up from yesterday. I'll keep you posted with how it goes.

Cheers all
Tony
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
If the band is not ready, the rest is meaningless.

G.
Click to expand...

Agreed, to some extent rigorous rehearsal is as, if not more, important than good tracking.

It seems that the earlier on in the process something is, the more important it is. Not to say that everything else isn't important, but the better things are at the start, the easier they are later on.

I learned that the hard way.... :rolleyes:
 
I hear ya, and I do agree.

This however, is a learning curve for us all. Hearing his mistakes and inconsistencies recorded is just what he needs so he can learn from them I think. He's not had the benefit of that nearly as much as the rest of us in the band have.

Do you know of any techniques or practice regimes drummers use for getting their aim better?

Ta
Tony
 
I think you can move each track forward and backwards in the BR1600CD to stomp out any phase issues, but I can't say I really tried it that way. I dumped everything to CD, then imported them into Sonar and did all my waveform manipulation on the computer. It's alot easier when you can see the waveforms, there's really no guesswork.

Anyhoo, if anything, you -will- find a significant difference if the snare on different tracks is out of phase (which it likely will be if you used a combination of close-micing and room/OH micing). The easiest thing to do, assuming the 2 front/back mics and the 2 OH mics were equidistant from the snare, is to try and move your snare track back until it matches up with the other 4 mics. At first, it might sound a bit mushy, not alot of snap like you hear when your jamming. But as you move the track closer to being in phase, it brightens up and gets louder. Eventually it will sound damn near perfect, then as you continue to move it too far, it will start to get slightly mushy again. Here's an easy way to determine how much you should theoretically have to move your snare track to get it back in phase (if you even want to use the snare track at all):

Measure the distance between the snare drum and the OH/room mics (assuming they're all equidistant from the snare). Measure it in meters and pretend you're Canadian. Drink a stubby. Continue measuring. Then take your measurement in meters, divide by 344, and multiply by 1000. That will tell you how many milliseconds back you should have to move the snare track to get it in sync with the room mics. You can probably expect about a 4 to 8 millisecond adjustment.
 
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