Tracking my band live, suggestions on drums needed.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jay Jay
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Jay Jay

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Here's the setup,
M-Audio delta 1010. 8 channels
Playing in a basement approx 20x20' Cinder block walls. wood framing/floor above, cement floor with carpet(no padding), ceiling height approx 9'.
Lots of garbage in the room.(washer dryer, shelves,patio furniture, etc.)
Drums against the back wall, all the amps and PA on the opposite side facing the drums.

2 guitars with 57's
1 bass direct

The vocals will go through the PA as we record but I'm not going to track them. They'll be recorded later. We need them just to follow the feel of the song. But, there will be some bleed into the other mics. That brings me to the drum question....

Drums: 5 channels to use
1: Kick (AKG)
2: Snare (57)

Now, do I use a dynamic on each of the three toms, or a pair of overheads?????

Pros, cons, suggestions? I won't have my monitors there so it'll be hard to try it and see what sounds good.

Whacha think???

Jay...
 
I think you're gonna have a REAL hard time getting a decent sound with this setup. Isolating your drum mics is going to be next to impossible if you're running a PA in the same room along with guitar and bass amps. I'd find a headphone amp and headphones to go around rather than a PA for starters. Get the bass to go direct and throw some moving blnkets over the guitar amps. You have your work cut out for you.
 
I agree with Track Rat. A PA in that situation would be a disaster. Use headphones if at all possible. I'd go as far as moving the guitar amps to a different room.

As for the toms/ overhead question, I'd go for overheads.

If you have an external mixing board, I'd mix all three toms to one channel and record that on the last track, but I'd have two overheads one way or another.

Another thing you could do is have the guitars play for referance and not record them. That would give you two more recording tracks and you'd have enough for all three toms and the two overheads. Overdub the guitars later.

That's how I'd do it anyway.
 
Thanks for the suggestions.


I'm gonna try the mixer idea, I'll sub mix the toms and give them their own track.
There are 2 rooms in the basement. I'll see if I can put the guitar amps in there and run headphones.

Unfortunately, some of the members think that any recording will be fine. We used 2 condensers hanging from the ceiling once at a practice studio, and they thought that sounded pretty good. If it were up to me, I would track everything. No one else wants to put the time into it so this is what I'm stuck with doing.
I'm lucky I managed to talk the singer into doing vocals seperately.
 
No one else wants to put the time into it
Click to expand...

That, JJ, is your biggest problem by a long way. I'm only a little more advanced but have learned that getting everybody committed to the best recording is critical, and that production is more about people skills than anything. Cajole, persuade, plead - tell them that once the recording session is over, that's it, doubling the time commitment will quadruple the quality, give them something to be proud of, you must get them to commit and give you some space.

Playing them a comrecially produced CD back to back with what they think is "fine" may well help you make your case.

You can do fine technically with the amendend set up you had got to in the last post - I did something very similar and got the recording good enough that detailed tracking and musicianship issues became clear. Don't forget that overheads capture most of the drum sound in this kind of set up.

Good luck and enjoy:)
 
Dude....I just went through this yesterday.

My friend wanted me to help record his band for a gig demo.

I have some o.k. mics and gear so he tells me to bring the kitchen sink because they want a kick ass recording....in the basement.

I oblidged and it came out really pretty good......but they got all ansty with the set up time. It worked out fine though.

We did 3 mics on the kit through my mixer to both their singer's Zoom 10 track and my Roland vs880.

RE-20 on kick
SM57 on snare
CAD E-200 as a mono overhead (I did not have a pair of stereo condensers and they were a little impatient about setting up)

The guitar and bass were recorded direct as scratch tracks.
We took the bass direct to the mixer from the head's line out
and the guitar just direct.

With out the amps on it was MUCH easier getting a good drum recording.
We all just monitored through headphones from one of those little Art 4 channel headphone amps.

Fortunately the those guys dealt with me wanting to do some mic fidgeting and level adjusting soundchecks.....which did take a while to get right and the friend who wanted me to bring everything was the most impatient..... but after the mics and levels were set we banged out 3 songs (2 or 3 takes each) in a bout 20 minutes.

Unfortunately the singer's 10 track is new to him and he wasnt sure about some of the features so he only felt comfortable recording a stereo submix of the drums. But it just took a little extra trial and error practice recordings and the submix sounded very good.

I did all mics on 3 seperate tracks and a submix of the guitars on the 4th......because I wanted to be able to work on some different drum mixing techniques later on.

The mixer gave us many options ( a Tascam M30......not the smallest most portable thing but good preamps and decent EQ and a ton of routing......for $80 bucks)

In your case too, if the band needs to hear the vox ...or the drummer needs to hear the guitars then a mixer could alow you to monitor those ....with your singer in the other room.....while not haveing to record them or getting bleed into the drum mics.

About stereo versus mono overheads......the drummer last night has a small 4 piece kit so there was no sweeping tom fills or anything. A mono overhead kept a tight focused sound.
It did take some experimenting to get the 1 overhead in just the right position to keep the cymbals balanced in volume.

If your drummer has a larger kit, you might want to use a stereo set up for a wider kit image in the overall mix.

You just have to be carful to "center" the kit in the stereo image from a stereo pair of overheads so the kit doesnt sound lopsided, and a little more careful about the phase relationship of the oh's and kick mic.

If you can leave your gear set up then you can be a little more picky and work on a couple tweaks at a time and still basically be set to record next time. I wish I had that option.

The more you can convince your bandmates that since its not costing you any studio time to do, then a "good enough" attitude is pretty pointless when a little extra time can result in better than expected if not fantastic results.

My buddy brought a good point to my attention though.
Except for the singer...no one in the band is into recording.....and the singer is new to it, so when they asked why I needed to move the kick mic 2 inches or why am I hooking up EXTRA gear (outboard pre amp and limiter) instead of just plugging in the mic to the recorder and hitting record, they really wern't understanding my answers and felt that they couldnt participate in that part of the process.
They just wanted to play.
Cant blame them for that.

So anyway....get a mixer.
Sorry for rambling.

-mike
 
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