My first real drum recording

[hunter]

So far I never recorded drums, only worked with loops. So yesterday I was in band practice room with our drummer, we installed 6 mics, routed them though the Behringer mixer and recorded from the channel inserts into the line ins of my Emagic 6/2 interface (has no mic ins).

I was unable to monitor the stuff, just made the levels of all tracks as good as possible (without preamps/compressors) and listened to it today. Only drums recorded so far, and then I blend in and out the backing track to give some context. We recorded the backing 2 weeks ago with some cr@ppy mic so the drummer could have it on the headphone while tracking for orientation.

Now I find that these low budget recorded drums sound quite well, what do you think? As I never did drums before I have difficulties to evaluate whether it's good or not ...

http://www.klangforschungszentrum.de/temp/drumtest.mp3

[Kepu]

I actually like it, but the thing I don't like is the song you're playing at the start :P
but they sound good

[_tom_]

I actually like it, but the thing I don't like is the song you're playing at the start :P
but they sound good

+1 :lol: The drums sound pretty good to me.

[gingataff]

sounds very live, probably needs alot of compression for a recording. One criticism (which I don't like doing because I'm not such a negative person ) the snare sounds quite distant and a bit like its played on a large tin can, I'm listening through Fostex PM0.5 mkII monitors if that helps, they're not as forgiving as pc speakers or a home stereo but they're not completely neutral either :)

[38thBeatle]

I thought it was pretty good. As Gingataff points out, a touch of compression would help smoth things out- just a personal view. I quite liked the snare though I am listening to it through PC speakers.

[jt]

:D Have to say i agree with 38th. I liked the snare. You do need to put a touch of Compression across the desk inorder to even out the sound & next time don`t put the Tom Tom mics up to near the Cymbals as the cymbals will boom & they will cut through the mix anyway. Again compression will help with this.

Liked it myself  :D

 :D  8)

[HTH AMPS]

not bad at all, need to cut down on the ringing on that snare though - a little bit of gaffer will sort that.  hit the snare and move your finger round the snare skin while hitting it to find where the 'ring' is coming from.

kick could do with more slap/thud too - try this type of eq...

+3db @ 75Hz (thud)
-6db @ 300-500 Hz (takes away the tubbyness)
+3db @ 2-4KHz (slap)

there is alot you can do if you feed those basic tracks into something like Logic Audio - gating the kick, snare and toms will help alot.  they will sound wierd on their own but remember that you're only really using those close mics to bring each drum into focus - the overheads should be your main drum sound.

 :twisted:

[hunter]

Thanks all, these are some useful recommendations indeed.

So far I had used channel strip presets from Logic Pro (where you call up a preset like "rock snare" and it would open compressor, limiter, gated reverb, eq all with preset settings), but I hadn't open one of the plugins to finetune the settings.

Will do the other tracks with my band members and then see how they do in the full mix before I go more into detail. Was playing around with your EQ values on a Bus HTH, they seem very useable indeed.

Let's see whether I can make this all happen, if only there was more time ...

[HTH AMPS]

making a copy of your snare track also works too, here's how...  copy the basic snare track, filter off everything below 400Hz with a shelving EQ.  gate this track so you only hear the snare 'hit'.  try some reverb with pre-delay so there is a small gap before the reverb sounds.  also EQ your reverb on the snare towards the high-mids/top end of the EQ spectrum - you don't want anything under 400Hz treated with reverb on a snare, it's just gonna mud things up. play with the parametric EQ to get some snap back from the snare,  compress it to hell then mix this track in with the rest of the drums.  all you're doing here really is getting the top-end snap out of the snare and having a seperate track to mix that back in to 'focus' the snare without that 'ring' you get in the lo-mids.

I miss this sound engineering stuff, gotta get my hands dirty again.

:twisted: