recording conga's

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luckystrike

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i recorded a conga track for a sort of reggae/island sounding song of mine the rest of the track is pristine including the snares and foot drum (thats rare for me) however the conga's sound really flat and lifless i havnt had much of chance to eq them etc as i got ear tired but has any one got any idea's on this.

they were recorded using an electronic drum kit (yahmaha dd5).

any help would be great thx
 
Did they sound good in the room? If so, then it's probably a mic selection/position issue. If you have some other mics available, try them out. You might even try a stereo x-y configuration.
 
I've found that most percussion instrument could use some short reverb to make them come alive. Also, a mid boost might sound unnatural when heard alone, but in the mix it really helped me. Not sure about the center freq anymore but make a fairly broad band with a boost of 5db or so and sweep it around.
 
compress them a bit and add some reverb
and dont worry bongo and conga's ususally are flat sounding
you just gotta know how to liven them up or in some cases you dont
 
Hand Percussion

The best hand percussion I ever got was in a natural stone basement shaped like a 'T' with a pile of wood in the corner. I was using a stereo pair of small diaphragm condensers driven hard to a tape recorder...

The mics were about six feet away on an upright stump in the middle of the room I think...

It was in a house I rented back in the day, and I've never been able to duplicate that sound. :(
 
One thing I did on a CD a while back that seemed to work fairly well was to put a fairly mellow microphone at ground level below them and a second, brighter mic a few inches above them, then pan them somewhat to either side of center.

[Edit: Oh, wait, did you mean that the congas were electronic?]
 
Conga drums need a short bright reverb to give them some life. Also, a common "trick" with conga drums is to place them on a sheet of plywood, for brighter reflections (I actually have my congas on a sheet of plywood with a second plywood gobo for whatever additional reflections I may need).

If you are indicating the conga sounds came from a drum machine, then you are more limited (sice you are stuck with the sound the machine gives you) although there are some options.

Electronic percussion almost always benefits from some added reverb. Also you can also take the electronic sound and send it through speakers into a room and then try to record the room sound (as a stand alone or blended in with the electronic sound. Naturally, the room has to sound reasonably decent for this to work.
 
the DD5 is a fairly old drum machine right? how good are the congo sounds on it? i don't remember it even having real congo sounds. i thought it had those 303 or 808 congo sounds?

anyway, if they sounds lifeless, then you might want to get some congo samples and use a software sampler (others here no more about giga and kontakt, etc... than i do).

i have an ASR-x pro (drum machine / sampler) and the congo samples on it are pretty ok, but i play a form of music (go-go) that is congo/timbale intensive, so it wouldn't do. i had to go take samples of a real percussionist and make my own samples.
 
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