powerful drum sound

  • Thread starter Thread starter drummersteve
  • Start date Start date
D

drummersteve

New member
hi there, im relatively new to this scene so all advice is appreciated.
iv been playing aorund with recording drums reecently, and the quality i can get is good. although, they seem to lack the power which i hear on pro tracks.
obviously im no pro n my equipment isnt all pro either, but does anybody have any advice on how to fatten up my drum sound? thanks

Steve
 
There are some mixing tricks that can help if the original tracks are pretty good. (They don't have to be perfect)

What are you using to record and playback with?

Tom
 
drum miking, mik setups

I have pretty much the same question as the one above. I have the aardvark q10, so I have eight ins to work with and one or two probably ought to be saved for scratch guitars if possible...

i am recording with these mics

overheads (2)akg c430's
higher toms and snare (3) sm 57
floor tom (1) senn 421
kick (1) beta 52.

I also have 2 58's and several other lower end 57 types, ev co4's

the drummer I will be working with next has a four piece dw, however, he uses a supplemental snare, which has tripped me up in planning. What are some ideas for miking this up?
 
One thing to try is to mix your drums to a stereo track in the usual way, then copy this track and apply compression to the copied track, and then blend it in with the original to get more punch.

I find settings around 10ms attack, 80ms release, threshold around -25, -30db, compression ratio around 8:1, then makeup gain to suit, gets the hihats pumpin and can make for a punchy blend
 
that really worked, it made my kick sound so much more punchy n livened the kit up so much, it just needed that punch behind it.

thanks again.

Steve
 
another way to get a real nice bass tone is to make a duplicate track of the bass drum and apply a heavy expander/gate to it to isolate the snap of the drum.
then, if you can apply real-time plug-ins (assuming it's a digital recording and not analog, which is a heavy assumption), or can make another copy of the track, do a low-pass filter on the original track to take a lot of the high-end defininition out. boost at 50 Hz and use some standard bass-drum EQ settings for the low end and snap (applied to the appropriate tracks, respectively) and mix together until you get a fully balanced, warm bass sound.
if you set your tracks up right, you should end up with one track that has a punchy, defined sound of the pedal hitting the drum, and another that contains all the "meat," if you will, of the sound.

this works great in settings where there are portions of the track with an isolated bass drum part or a bass-thin part in a mix, because you can boost the volume on the low-end track (or do an EQ envelope boosting at 80 Hz if there's no bass guitar at that portion of the track), to compensate for the relatively thin texture.

i haven't tried the other method that was suggested yet, so i can't compare the two, but i know that using the method i just described even if you can't get a nicely balanced source sound out of your mic-ing method for the bass drum, you can use the two tracks together to make it sound like you have much better gear than you actually do.
lemme know how it works out for you if you try it
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top