The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I know NOTHING about drums, drumming, or any other drum-related activities. I don't know how to properly set up my kit, I don't know how or even why it's important to tune my kit. I don't know the best way to record my kit. I also don't know how to play it.

Suggestions, comments, whatever.

And when recording how does everyone like their drums panned? Common sense tells my floor tom on the right, hihat and high-tom on the left, but recently I've been noticing the paning in many songs is reversed.

Will I go to hell for panning drums the wrong way?

Puce-

I think when people reverse them, it's to make it sound liek you are standing in front of the kit, like, you know, an audience member.

In reality, when listening to a band, you are barely abe to hear any kind of stereo seperation, you just hear the drums as "in front of you."

All panning is great, all panning is the devil.

You can do no wrong!

Also of interest, considering I have a restraining order and by law am not allowed within 5 miles of a drum kit, How to make drum samples sound good.


At the moment, my favorite thing to do is take some so-so drum sounds, and compress the fuck out of them so they are little more than static, and then a touch of reverb. Of course, i can't do that if i'm going for the real drumkit sounding thing. Where i just tend to use a little bit of compression with reverb.

I also like using heavy phasors over drumloops.. but that's another story ;P

So what tricks do other people use?.. actually i'd be interested to know who uses real drums vs samples in their songs.. i can usually pick it.. but sometimes i'm surprised.


La!

HKD - Unit Z wrote:actually i'd be interested to know who uses real drums vs samples in their songs..

On my j$ stuff I like to take hits from recorded CDs, then add a standard reverb to make them fit the ambience for what I'm doing.

For instance, my 'From this day on' uses a bass drum from the Melvins and a snare hit from PJ Harvey. And the source of the hat escapes me. I have found that not surprisingly demo / rehearsal / not overly produced records yield the best results. I often use slits from the Slits 'peel sessions' CD because Palmolive was the best drummer in the world.

Here is how I set up my kit: http://homepage.mac.com/bortwein/music/

I have no idea how to record it correctly, but I have found I like how my recording sounds better when I mic it from above. I'd rather try doing a multiple mic system and place it around and above the kit, but I don't have that option currently.

http://s93909993.onlinehome.us/mp3s/seabrushdemo.mp3

I talked to a drummer at the jazz club I work at, and he said the best way he's found to mic a drumset with a single mic is behind and over your head. The clip above is ten seconds or so with brushes and plenty of reverb. I like the sound I'm getting.

I bought a cowbell and a china crash today. There's a reason those china cymbals cost like $12: They sound like ass. I mean, it's not THAT bad, but it's not very good, either.

Did you record that with a s58? Why does my s58 sound like poo?

Really nice expressive sound. I'm startin to feel self concious about the fact that my large collection of samples can't ever sound like that.

no offense sober, I for one am not impressed by that recording.

Instead of spending $12 on crappy crashes/splashes... save up and buy a set of mics. A couple of condensors and do it right. If you do, you'll be like the best songfighter ever next to FBF, JB, ADD, The Hell Yeahs, Eddie Bangs, The Idiot Kings, Brother Machine, Hoblit (yeah, I went there), etc...

NOt picking on you dude, just stating that one mic hanging from the ceiling ain't gonna cut it.

In the mean time, practice practice practice. AND, instead of playing the drumset... put the mic on one drum at a time. Mic the snare, play it. Mic the cymbol(s) play it/them. Mic the bass drum...play it. Mix them all down to one track. Just a suggestion and at least until you have a set of mics to record with. (all this is stated outside of actually practicing the drums all together, there is no substitution for practice)

PSA: I'm no drummer.

I think you got a very authentic jazz sound there. Seems a little cymbal heavy, although I only listened once...


Drum sounds are so subective... gear, the room, tuning, skintypes, stick types, the drummer, the types of mics, the angle of the mic, etc all contribute to making things different.

Yeah, the average schmoe can't tell you they notice, in their mind a snare is a snare, but any musican who cares and any person does notice, they just are not aware. Like if I play you a classical piece, your brain hears it for what it is, and you either like it or not, but untrained players/musicologists can't sit back and say "oh..nice baroque stylings" or what have you.


Here's my fundemental process for drum sounds, and if you listen to my sf stuff, you can hear some good, average, shit, and wicked sounds, depending on your tastes!!

Shit in = shit out.

Conversely.....

These days this is my process:

1) play the kit and make sure the room sound and tuning matching what I think I want. Fix em up if I got time, move things around etc.

2) mic it up. Ususally, as I have 8 tracks in, I go with a
d112 on the kick, half way in, 1 .5 inches to the left of the beater. I like a sharp beater sound with some umf! I put a marshall pencil shaped condenser (mxl 2001?? I think) on the snare, pointing straight down at the head to capture more crack, and a sharper tone... at least that's what I think I'm accomplishing!! I put 57's on all three toms, and a left and right overhead up. Then I place my vocal condenser about 10 feet away to capture the room.

3) Record a test. I've found that depending on the tune and the day, I may have to re-position mics to improve the attack or depth of a tom, etc.

4) record the tune.

5) using cubase, I then place silence whereever I can in the individual tracks, especially toms, as a kind of gate.

6) I gate and compress the toms to improve the attack. I do not use auto releases, they seem to suck with my playing style. So, I loop a tom tom, and watch the meter to see what the decibel level is when I want the release and attack times to be...

7) I add reverb.s

8) I use mulitband compressors on the kick and snare, and some times on the overheads.

9) I place the panning.

10) Sometimes I'll buss out a left right overall mix into a compressor to do that whole newyork trick.



This is my current techique, allthough I make a point of approaching it different each time, to improve my learning. I rarely use templates. While they save time, they diminish my rentetion of information!!!

All of this works FOR ME.

The most significant factor in drum recording should be obvious: The drummer. How you hit (bounce!!) the sticks, how you think and hear, that is most important. A shit hot drummer with killer feel for the tune, with one mic on, placed right, in the right room, etc. can blow away the sound of a prisitine protooled out studio that is recording a shitty kit with a shitty drummer. This is a fact!!!



jsut my current thoughts....

Hoblit wrote:
...instead of playing the drumset... put the mic on one drum at a time. Mic the snare, play it. Mic the cymbol(s) play it/them. Mic the bass drum...play it. Mix them all down to one track...

I'd like to venture that even drummers with incredible rythym would have a ridiculously difficult time getting 6+ seperate drum tracks to line up. If I were to do that, it would sound very much like 6 bumbling drummers playing one thing at a time rather than one good drummer. I'll stick to sequencing until I can do well enough on my own, thank you.

And unless some drum mics go up on gearfight, I've got many many things on my purchase list before that.

Leaf wrote:These days this is my process:

1) play the kit and make sure the room sound and tuning matching what I think I want. Fix em up if I got time, move things around etc.

2) mic it up. Ususally, as I have 8 tracks in, I go with a
d112 on the kick, half way in, 1 .5 inches to the left of the beater. I like a sharp beater sound with some umf! I put a marshall pencil shaped condenser (mxl 2001?? I think) on the snare, pointing straight down at the head to capture more crack, and a sharper tone... at least that's what I think I'm accomplishing!! I put 57's on all three toms, and a left and right overhead up. Then I place my vocal condenser about 10 feet away to capture the room.

3) Record a test. I've found that depending on the tune and the day, I may have to re-position mics to improve the attack or depth of a tom, etc.

4) record the tune.

5) using cubase, I then place silence whereever I can in the individual tracks, especially toms, as a kind of gate.

6) I gate and compress the toms to improve the attack. I do not use auto releases, they seem to suck with my playing style. So, I loop a tom tom, and watch the meter to see what the decibel level is when I want the release and attack times to be...

7) I add reverb.s

8) I use mulitband compressors on the kick and snare, and some times on the overheads.

9) I place the panning.

10) Sometimes I'll buss out a left right overall mix into a compressor to do that whole newyork trick.

This is a good list for the individual track recording of the drums. I, however have been fighting through the deal of having to record the drums as a stereo track due to my soundcard only having two analog ins at this point.

In mono, as in stereo, there needs to be a balance in frequency as there is in space for desired sounds to all be heard in a mix. Now while I'm no expert on the art of recording to two track, what I've been doing with the kit is micing the appropriate instruments back to the mixer and panning and EQing at the board to various degrees prior to hitting the soundcard. *Also running a stereo tube compressor as inserts mic pre to the board on the kick and snare channel so that I can beat the passionate moments **..... And if you don't have one of these, keep the levels down. Digital means that you can turn it up without having to add more noise to the floor. Crank it later..... there are counter arguements to this ..... such as desired digital distortion and blah blah blah...... but start with the basics first. USE YOUR EARS!!!!

Right now the kit I have is a pair of hats, a kick, ride/crash, and a snare and what I've been doing is putting a 58 in the kick (right inside, placed on a pillow at the beater), a pencil condenser on the snare angled away from the hats slightly down, but across the skin and one large diaphragm condenser faced in the 90 degree angle away from the condenser on the snare, but out in the room a bit more. My figuring on it is that I'm hopefully creating a wide XY pattern with the condensers possibly beating the flanging and phasing that will occur with cymbal crashes as such. And that when it flops down to mono (although I don't really know why we worry about mono since very little audio is pumped through in mono cept for an old Ford or the supermarket and at that point it's muzak and you've already made your 8th Mil! ) you won't hear too much of a drastic loss in frequency due to phase cancellation.

Obviously the room is not treated, but I've been finding good results with the liveness of the room in adding various colour on the minimal kit and the mix (although sometimes also contributes to some phase issues as well in which case I adjust the mics to try to beat them). Sometimes the room mic is a beautiful thing. I usually keep the kick up the centre, pan the snare to desired side (if you want the audience's perspective or the drummer's perspective) about 3 or 9 o'clock and the room mic hard panned away from the snare mic. Then once in and the kick and snare have been recorded at hopefully the same levels I stereo expand the stereo drum channel and add the multiband compressor. It seems to get good results especially in bringing out the natural reverb in the room, giving space to the kit from left to right and giving things more life by bringing up the background ambience by virtue of the compression (should be used sparingly or excessively when the music calls for it ).

I am only trying to add another dimension on the individually recorded kit concept to a live stereo kit recorded straight off the floor for those with the desire to record a kit but a small sound card and still making that work. It seems to have worked alright for me for the most part, lately, and I don't have to program drums....... cuz I HATE programming drums...... ugh what a chore.

Also back in the day one mic was used up in a room full of instrumentalists and listen how that stuff sounds, so experiment with combinations of mics. Sometimes less is more. Colour and space is what your after.

A great thread this, so I thought I'd put in my two pennyworth.

I have worked in several recording studios and firstly I don't think it's possible to be both engineer and drummer if you want to get a good kit sound, unless you have a lot of time. To soundcheck a kit for recording takes long enough even with a drummer and engineer.

We used to use an akg D12 on the bass drum, sure sm57s's on everything else (for snare one on top and one underneath) and a pair of akg 440's as overheads. That's a lot of mic's and desk channels.

A friend of mine (who worked on the accoustic stage at Glastonbury) came up with a brilliant way of live micing. Buy a 8' x 4' sheet of half inch plywood and cut in two, Buy 2 PZM's (which are cheap) and glue on in the centre of each 4' by 4' bit of plywood. Hang these from the ceiling facing the stage and you get a great stereo sound.
The larger the sheet is the more sensitive the mic becomes.

HKD - Unit Z wrote:Also of interest, considering I have a restraining order and by law am not allowed within 5 miles of a drum kit, How to make drum samples sound good.

So what tricks do other people use?.. actually i'd be interested to know who uses real drums vs samples in their songs.. i can usually pick it.. but sometimes i'm surprised.

So far, all my Cow Exchange submissions use sampled drums; some people have mistaken these for the real thing.

I record each sequence as a single take on the keyboard rather than doing layers of kick, snare, hi-hat, etc, though some people have trouble with that. Then it's a matter of quant-16 or quant-32 and minor touch-ups. They still sound fairly mechanical, but because I'm recording them in one stream, it allows for a more realistic feel and makes variations more natural.

Finally depending on the kit and the song, sometimes I've run the drum track through drum compression (the default Drum compression in Sound Forge's Wave Hammer plug-in works great).

The tambourine is real, mic'd with a KSM-27 (usually twice to pan it in stereo), then run through similar drum compression.

A lot of my favorite sounds (including drum sounds) are sold at Sonic Implants' site.

They have tons of mp3 samples there too, it's really awesome. I use the Windows SoundFont version, personally. I used the new "Yamaha Custom Recording Drums - Sticks1; Snares On" on the "Ain't Gettin' Any" song. The "Hofner Beatle Bass" (dry, then processed by an amp modeler) and "B3 Organ 1" appear on this too. Also there's a "$5 off $30" coupon you can use if you actually want to buy some. But since I'm getting no comission from them, let's move on.

For "Cur", I used a generic sound font (not sure which offhand), then compressed the heck out of it, like you were threatening. I also sampled a bunch of random sounds, including a "soda pop drum kit", using the carbonated fizzing as a splash. You can't hear it well in the "Cur" song, but it was still fun to assemble. Maybe you can make a crazy kit on your own.

Sometimes adding some "drum room" reverb (kind of a quick echo) to the track comes in handy too.

Also if you're going for realism, it doesnt hurt to use real mic'd instruments where you can. For example, if I'm recording live tambourine, guitar, piano, vocals, etc, you might not notice the fake drums (unless they're REALLY poor), compared to if you just had vocals backed entirely by synths.

Hope this gives you some new ideas. I'm relatively new to the non-MIDI/hybrid world, so hopefully these approaches aren't too crazy.

tonetripper wrote:This is a good list for the individual track recording of the drums. I, however have been fighting through the deal of having to record the drums as a stereo track due to my soundcard only having two analog ins at this point.

In mono...

Yeah. I rarely record my drums with more than 2 mics anymore. I use my Studio Projects B-1 as an overhead directly over the snare and a Audio Technica Pro25 on the beater side of the kick. I push the kick drum up against my futon to keep it from moving and to act as a huge bass trap. I think it comes out well after I compress and EQ the tracks. This week's Loyalty Day track was recorded with one mic, a MXL V67G placed about snare height in front of the kit on an imaginary line between the snare and kick. Simple and sounds good.

Of course, I think Leaf's drums sound great. I wasn't sure if they were real or electronic.

Be well,
Ken

Kamakura wrote: A friend of mine (who worked on the accoustic stage at Glastonbury) came up with a brilliant way of live micing. Buy a 8' x 4' sheet of half inch plywood and cut in two, Buy 2 PZM's (which are cheap) and glue on in the centre of each 4' by 4' bit of plywood. Hang these from the ceiling facing the stage and you get a great stereo sound.
The larger the sheet is the more sensitive the mic becomes.

...I don't get it.

PZM's are boundry layer mic's (like those police use in interegation rooms) they are flat on one side so they can be stuck to a wall, or wherever.
If you get a large bit of wood and stick a PZM in the middle of it you get a sensitive though large, fairly mobile mic. 2 of them gives you stereo.

You explained the part I got.

...sorry

Kamakura wrote:If you get a large bit of wood and stick a PZM in the middle of it you get a sensitive though large, fairly mobile mic. 2 of them gives you stereo.

The fact that they are already mics makes them portable. I'm just gonna clarify what you are saying a bit. The PZMs become more sensitized when they are against a hard surface cuz the bounce paths off of the hard surface go close enough to the diaphragm of the PZM condenser to activate the membrane thus making them a good room mic or area mic. PZMs are used on stages for plays because they are very sensitive condensers usually in an hemispherical pattern which gives them an incredible expanse of pick up (also at times an incredible issue of feedback when not placed properly away from the speakers).

I think, Kamakura, you should be careful when you speak of stereo pairs. There is a lot of science (that and good ears) going into micing with multiple mics to achieve proper stereo. Simply putting two PZMs on boards and placing them in front of a drum kit does not constitute stereo, but would constitute two independent mic channels with potential phasing and flanging with each other. I'm not disputing the mic method of PZMs on two wooden boards, as they are taken from their hemispheric directionality to a more directional field by being placed on the boards, as being a good way to mic a kit, but they must be placed at proper angles to one another to get away from phasing and flanging as such.

In a live capacity you can get away with it (also in addition to this if you use the plexi-glass casing around the drummer with PZMs on it, it will cut the bleed in the other mics on stage - namely the vocal mics - and defeat feedback and level issues - of which I agree with the principle of your PZM micing method of a drum kit) cuz of untreated rooms, outside venues having complex frequency responses (in this respect, stereo almost at times becomes non-functional), but in recording you should be more careful cuz instead of little people you would hear and see on a stage in an audience, those same little people would be under your microscope in the recording process. Adjustments will have to be made to accomodate acoustic issues with the pairing of these mics. Just a little analogy of live sound versus recorded arts. PZMs or BLMs spread wide enough can do it but then you might have holes in the pick-up patterns or in the staging or the instrument or person you want to mic.

Great results can be achieved with this method and I have used and heard the sound from this type of micing concept, but use with caution. PZMs or BLMs because of their wide polar patterns can be difficult, in terms of getting out of the other matched mic's polar pattern, to manage. That ought to be at least two pence worth.

tonetripper wrote:I think, Kamakura, you should be careful when you speak of stereo mics.

Stereo mics, Stereo mics, STEREO MICS!
I think I said in my first post that it wasn't my concept. I have also heard music recorded in just such a fashion... It's in true STEREO, and it rocks.

tonetripper wrote:That ought to be at least two pence worth.

At least. Maybe even three, though for shear gravitas I'd hold out for more.

All a big mistake........

I've spent a lot of money on my set in the past week. I'll post pictures as soon as I have batteries in my camera. I'll also likely drum for my next SF entry, whenever that might be.