Singing Drummers

dintymoore said:
Is there any way you can throw away the drummer's vocal track and get him to come back in and do his vocal parts over?

Maybe if you showed the band what the problem is they'd see that it was the best thing to do.
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Bingo. Or lie and tell him you had a phase issue with that track and you want to recut a vocal just for effect. They won't know what that means.
 
glynb said:
Set the mic so it's right on his mouth. Use a noisegate, set the threshold really high, tell him to belt out his vocal loudly. tweak the settings so the gate hardly triggers when he just plays drums, only 'opens' when he sings close up in the mic. The gate will cut out anything but when he sings...problem solved.
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You'll have a hard time gating so that the snare doesn't trigger the gate. And if you gate upon tracking, you'll paint yourself into a corner. Gate it after the fact. There's far more flexibility.

But the best idea is to let him sing while tracking, then just get vocals to resing anyway.
 
It's not that hard to mix lead drum vocals. You just have to be willing to let go of old mixing preferences. If you have to get rid of the overheads because the vocal mic has all the drum sound you need, so be it.

Just throw up all of the faders then balance that sucker. Don't worry about silencing tracks that you think you need.

Put any and all thoughts of gates out of your head. Even with manual edits, there will just be no way to pull off a natural sound.
 
Blimey, this sparked a debate and a half!

I did a mixdown last night and listened to it this moring in the car on the way to work, and to be honest it's not too bad. It's good enough for what they wanted in my opinion. I just took as much HF out of the offending mic as I could get away with in the end.

They wern't cutting a platinum album, the session was more of a recording of a rehearsal so they could hear what they sounded like. I did suggest doing seperate vocals up front but they wanted to do the whole lot live. I didn't think this was too unreasonable given the objective.

Dave
 
tlennon1 said:
That is not even practical. Who does a recording in a single take. No errors, everything perfect. That will be the first unless it is a Live performance at a concert or show.
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One of the great aspects of progress and new techniques is that the old still remain, which means that however much a pain in the patootie it may be, you know it can be done the old way because once upon a time, that's all that there was....
witzendoz said:
OK so we won't talk about Don Henley,
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Or Levon Helm, Ringo, Don Brewer, Buddy Miles, Phil Collins, Robert Wyatt, even Karen Carpenter (I kid you not !), Roger Taylor, Peter Criss, Mickey Dolenz, Marvin Gaye, Iggy Pop, Jim Capaldi, Albert Bouchard, Joe English, Gil Moore, Kevin Godley, Jay Osmond..........there's loads of them. Tony Williams (Miles Davies, Lifetime..) was an awesome, fearsome, breathtaking drummer that sang frequently................and really badly. :D

witzendoz said:
The secret, can sing loud and into the Mic, can drum at a sensible volume. I used to really dislike singing drummers when out live, but on occasions a really good singing drummer would turn up and guess what, it all works.

In the studio, avoid unless it's only a quick demo but point out the short falls before they start and say there will be a compromise. The compromise may be to turn off/down the overheads.
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gecko zzed said:
It's unusual . . . but it can be done.
I wouldn't insist on a band recording in any particular way, but I would show them what they are going to end up with if they aren't prepared to compromise.
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Chibi Nappa said:
It's not that hard to mix lead drum vocals. You just have to be willing to let go of old mixing preferences. If you have to get rid of the overheads because the vocal mic has all the drum sound you need, so be it.

Just throw up all of the faders then balance that sucker. Don't worry about silencing tracks that you think you need.
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daveparker said:
Blimey, this sparked a debate and a half!

I did a mixdown last night and listened to it this moring in the car on the way to work, and to be honest it's not too bad.
They wern't cutting a platinum album, the session was more of a recording of a rehearsal so they could hear what they sounded like. I did suggest doing seperate vocals up front but they wanted to do the whole lot live. I didn't think this was too unreasonable given the objective.
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Atom Bomb said:
I was more referring to the advice that 'always do this'

There is no always.

Do what you like and what is an expression of how you want it to sound.


But yea, "always do this" was a bit of a stretch.
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I'd slightly modify that by saying that there is almost always a way around a problem if one is prepared to at least consider possible solutions and move from entrenchment. Saying "this can't be done" when it has already been done simply makes no sense to me. Will it be problematic ? Sure bloody ! Will it be a pain in the Francis ? Yeah, yeah it will be. Can it actually happen ? That's the question that needs to be answered.
Glad it worked out for you, Dave.
 
glynb said:
Set the mic so it's right on his mouth. Use a noisegate, set the threshold really high, tell him to belt out his vocal loudly. tweak the settings so the gate hardly triggers when he just plays drums, only 'opens' when he sings close up in the mic. The gate will cut out anything but when he sings...problem solved.
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How does that solve the problem? When he sings, the gate will open and let the drums in with the vocal. The original problem is still there. You might as well silence or cut out all the parts where he's not singing in the DAW. Same non-solution to the same problem.
 
Two Cents of stupid !!

Hey people.

What if you was to take the snare & overheads & make a reverse-phase of them to mix in with the vocal mic ..... would that help cancel anything??

also if you can trick him into just adding a syllable of any sort just before each vocal part, it'll activate the gate just before the voice actually comes in ... and maybe you can boost the gate a bit more without cutting into the voice ... only other way to remove the unwanteds in the vocal mic is maybe use a hi-cut to reduce the cymbols & eq to reduce the snare- I think... then prey for a useable voice to be left over to re-eq somehow into a semi-not-retarded sounding track ... would that be worth trying? Most kids these days think that anything is kewl if it sounds bad enough ... So whatever sound is left after that - just add some effects to it to hide what it really sounds like - You can give'm a Stephan Hawking voice with pitch correction too !
Just a thought - probably wouldn't help at all
 
Guitarsands said:
Hey people.

What if you was to take the snare & overheads & make a reverse-phase of them to mix in with the vocal mic ..... would that help cancel anything??
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Not really. If the vocal mic was already pretty in-phase with the drums, phase reversing it will just make it sound horrible and phasey, it won't cancel it.
 
Greg_L said:
No, it was fine to begin with. The Eagles are pure wimpy 70's shit. How anyone under the age of 60 likes that garbage is beyond me.
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Hey Gerg, I got a good song for that ;) :laughings:

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I've been over them. Even as a small kid, 30 years ago when they were relevant, I knew they were pure, sterile shit. :laughings:
 
I can explain the Eagles:
My dad loves them - he's in his 70's.
I hate them - I'm in my 50's.
I thought/still think Joe Walsh's complicity was the death knell of his creative patch (The Smoker They ...) and was a desperate (yet successful) attempt by the band to broaden their already oceanic appeal.
Almost everyone I went to college with loved them - now they're all comfy middle class folk who watch lifestyle TV, talk about how the world has gone to rack'n'ruin, the good old days and play music on their DVD sound systems.
Paper Lace (Billy Don't Be A Hero) - a fine example of dringing summers.
 
rayc said:
Paper Lace (Billy Don't Be A Hero) - a fine example of dringing summers.
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Agreed. I was going to mention him but I don't know his name. I didn't know his name in '74 when those singles came out. Didn't know his name when Paper Lace won "Opportunity knocks".
I think "The black eyed boys" was the better single though. And for all their saccharinity, the Eagles had a couple of great moments. But I ain't saying which ! :cool:
 
Greg_L said:
Good because the Eagles suck.
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Actually I should point out that I don't like the Eagles, I only brought it up because I was forced (stuck in a country hotel for the night, the only Hotel in town, and they had it playing on the big screen) to watch it. However, I was impressed by the audio quality of the sound and the clarity of Don's vocal even when playing drums.

I also don't like the Eagles due to having to play the stuff night in and night out as a pro muso some years back the enable me to pay the rent.

And thirdly the West Coast Eagles is the name of the other football team in town (we refer to them as the E-girls or Wet Toast) and we are one eyed Fremantle Dockers supporters.

Cheers
Alan.
 
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