Recording a bass drum on a shoestring budget

[ellieken]

I'm broke, and am in a band - great combination, huh?

I want to record but my computer's sound card is really bad, and if you do track-by-track recording there is a slight delay on the playback, so when you listen to the tracks you're recording on top of, you hear them about 0.5 seconds later than they actually are. This could be because we feed it through a 12-track mixer which feeds into the computer, as direct input is basically noise and overdrive! So obviously it also plays your voice back to you about half a second later which is really distracting.

So because of this, it's easier to do live recording but only have 3 mics - behringer xm8500s. We have one singer and two backing singers, so we can record the backing on top, which means we have two mics spare, but at the absolute minimum you need 3 mics for drums. The mics are an OK quality, and all we want is just a basic recording.

I guess I have two options: can't afford to buy a set of drum mics, so--buy a cheap mic (under $60) for the bass drum--or try to resolve the playback problem on my computer to record track-by-track, using the three behringers, no matter how shit the . I use Cubase 3 on Windows XP. What would you suggest?

Oh, and also - as I keep mentioning, the band is on a really tight budget and bought some cheap drums. The problem is that it doesn't have a hole in the bass drum skin. Should I cut a hole in the skin? Whereabouts and how big should it be?

Thanks a lot for reading, sorry about the length and complete lack of knowlege, it would be really helpful if you could give me some advice.

 

[Tim Brown]

Since you're on a shoestring budget - take the front head all the way off the kick drum and pack a blanket or two in it to completely deaden it.

Use one mic on a boom over the drummer's head aimed at the drummers kick drum knee. This will be about the middle of the drumset.

You need to come up with a speaker of some type. Even a stereo speaker will work. Wire it up to a 1/4" guitar cord, and stick that in the kick drum - you'll be using that instead of a kick mic. Cover the kick (with the speaker in it) with several layers of blankets


Do not boost low end on either of these mics, in fact roll out 3 db's on the kick mic.

Roll out (Cut) 6 decibels of midrange, and you might want to add 3db's of the hi end. (preferably cenetered somehwere around 700Hz to 750Hz, if you've got a sweepable mid on that mixer.) (You'll be doing more Eq'ing little later inside the PC, so you don't want to do too much to these tracks since you just have cheap stuff. Less is more.

Since you're going to be recording this all at once.

On the bass and guitar amps, I would roll out some low end as well. Why? Because they are just going to make your recording sound like MUD. The biggest mistake guiatrist and bass players make, is cranking the low end up really loud in a small room, you get standing waves in there, and you lose definition.

These two can probably line in - but keep in mind, that their volume in the room is going to effect the drums that get recorded. You need to hear everything clearly - plus, keep in mind that you can then Re-EQ these tracks once recorded on the computer, so you can boost the low end that's not there, but once you have a bunch of "muck" recorded, it's nearly impossible to get rid of it.



Tim

 

[Adam P]

I second the speaker-mic. You'll probably want an inexpensive DI box to plug it into.

 

[SonicClang]

Here's my suggestion. Use whatever mic you want to record the audio from the bass drum (rent one, that's really cheap!). I'm assuming Cubase can extract midi from the audio. I use Sonar 4.0 and it can. What it does is it creates a midi event every time it sees the bass drum hit. Just make sure you set the threshold correctly or it will make an event for other drums that bleed through. Then use the midi events to trigger a sample of a bass drum.

And there ya go. Bass drum recording on a shoestring budget. You can even use a 57 for that.