3 Hidden Barriers to a Great Drum Sound
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- Опубліковано 9 лип 2024
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The biggest "hidden barrier" to a great drum sound is usually the lack of a great drummer.
One of the most important choices is to guide the drummer to a better technique
@djentlover Tough to do and especially so with someone really lacking in technique.
In the studio is a bit late to be attempting to learn proper drumming skills but better late than never.
Great musicians on the other hand can make recording easy and make you seem like a good engineer as long as you don't really screw things up.
😂😂😂
I think your talking about a good drum performance vs sound. Sound is the tuning,mic placement,room and mixing not the performance. A decent drummer for a recording depends on your budget and who’s available in your area. Most pro musicians don’t play on amateur projects or work for amateur engineers. However if your recording a band you have to work with what you have and mix it the best you can. A recording engineer is not the band’s producer unless specifically hired as such.
@oceansiderecordingstudio I would disagree.
Performance is a good part of the drum sound, it's not timing or the complexity of the drumming but the actual sound I was talking about.
I've heard different drummers on the same kit in a live situation when I was doing sound and even on the same kit drummers sound different. One person will bash the cymbals and make you wonder if the drumkit itself is crap or the heads suck and then another drummer sits down and you're thinking how can this possibly be the same kit? Tuning and sound of the kit is yet another aspect here. If the engineer is controlling things and/or it's a good kit that the studio owns and maintains that can be VERY different than what someone might drag in and how they think it should be tuned and adjusted.
The hidden barrier to a great drum sound is that a good 808, these days, is hard to find :) (or TR-909, CR-78). That way of thinking of a drum like snare as having three zones is interesting. It's one thing that's tripped me up, while learning to record drums. I didn't think of the close mics as reinforcement, and was struggling with the fact that say SM57 bottom & SM57/Audix i5 top sounded so artificial. But trying to make the close mic pair sound 'natural' is wrong-headed, that's what the farther mics are for. Knowing that the close mics are for reinforcement lets you get a bit more utilitarian and surgical with the EQ on them and not be afraid of it sounding not like a natural snare.
That is often true, but not always. I had a session in my own room with Peter Erskine, and the sound just wouldn’t cohere. It’s very rare that this happens to me with a top player in my own room, but with that top player come great ears, so you know the problem is you - another timesaver. I have a method. Monitoring in mono only, and working with the overheads alone always gets me close. They should sound similar to a full kit mix.
I have a rule to keep them equidistant to the center of the snare and to have their patterns parallel to each other so that narrows the options a lot. Adding only the bass drum, reversing its polarity and searching a delay in the Pro Tools mixer until the lowest freqs are weakest, then flipping the polarity back gets me close. Snare, by itself, was the very same process but the nulls and peaks are more numerous and closer. A starting point is one millisecond per foot, but it doesn’t always work out. I use that as my max delay, say 1.5 ms on snare, 3 ms on bass drum and search shorter. I do not print these delays. If I’m very happy with them, I shift the waveform the same amount and bypass the delay plugin.
A good live room makes all of this easier, but I had 13 live brass players to consider and I liked what I was getting from them, playing behind 6’ tall glass in the same room.
Your drum sounds consistently impress me! Great sound, and great groove too!
Tip for phase, it works: Put some good test whacks in there, zoom in and line up phase by eye in the DAW by sliding the audio until you line up the waves to zero-crossings. You can check with your ears with the undo. The in-phase (drum or cymbal) element should sound thicker.
This is what i do too and i don't understand why everybody isn't doing this since it's so easy to do by eye in this digital era.
but if a mic picks up multiple sources, then you are only able to adjust in one dimension...what may happen is that sliding one element in phase, makes another element slide out of phase. That's where doing some phase adjustment in the real 3d world can help.
Hey Man! I usually start from snare and overheads relationship, and then add every next mic checking the polarity. But lately after I watched one of your latest videos, I start from flipping snare top! Because it hast to go up first, and it sounds more natural you're so right and such a simple concept, but I never thought about that before you said that! Push the air out with your snare guys and stay creative!👊👊👊
Love this stuff!! Looking forward to putting this tips into action on my next drum recording session! Thanks!
I love the crotch mic fullness… I always miss what the crotch mic adds when I remove it… with only 8 inputs (home studio) I have non-negotiable snare top, bottom, OH L and R, Kick and then 3 more. I most often use those 3 extra channels for hi tom, low tom, crotch mic/ mono front of kit room-ish mic.
I need to critically listen to the potential phase issues from that crotch mic, bc for me it helps SO much for the overall sound.
Thanks for nerding out so deep on this stuff we love, my dude!!!
I definitely agree about mics placed in between zones. I always base polarity flips of the close mics off the overheads and it's very difficult to get a crotch mic to work with all of that. The only way I've been able to get a crotch mic in phase is by messing with high pass filters on it. Even then, the overall drum sound was better without the extra mic haha
you can gate it and focus it with either snare or kick, and check polarity. add it in just enough for ambient harmonics
They had this almost mastered with fifties drums sounds. Sometimes only three mics in the room. With a bass player there too.early rocknroll and jazz. They did not have the options of multichannel mics. Back then using the ribbon mike( fullness) and careful mic placement
Thanks ❤
havent watched the video yet, but you look furious to tell me. Am I in trouble for my drum mix?
How do you balance the control you have over this method with the ease of use/quick workflow of running an auto-align plugin?
I’ve gone into incredible rabbit-hole depths with auto-align type plugins. Sound Radix Auto Align 2 irritates me because it for some reason likes to flip the phase in 20 of my 27 mics and it gives me a headache to look at a bunch of flipped waveforms. I think that the best results BY FAR actually come from using Auto-Align Post 2 by Sound Radix. It’s not meant for music but for lab mics. But holy crap does it work well!!!
If you're using a DAW, can't you just edit for near perfect phase alignment?
You can. One reason to do it right to begin with for me, is that i wouldnt want a client to come in and hear shit ass drums before I did the correction.
the problem with that is you have multiple sources in one mic, so unless you cut out individual sources somehow (but there is sustain there), moving one thing 'in time' moves another thing out potentially.
I understand the theory and I certainly appreciate you taking time to demo it out for us, but the fact is a drum kit is a spaced out instrument and is generally listened to at a distance, so it seems to me that phase mismatch is just part of the experience. Obviously, we don't want to make it worse, like adding a top and bottom mic together without flipping the polarity of one mic, but flipping a hh mic just because the low end increases on a snare... I don't think this is the right way to approach mixing. Much like peaks and nulls in an untreated mixing room, moving your listening position to a spot that "increases the low end" doesn't mean that what you're hearing is "better" or "correct". Like you say later, it's more about avoiding these issues- if it's an issue, then please adjust the mic position(s), at least this way all frequencies will shift in phase and still be within the literal proximity of a real drum kit. Not trying to be a jerk, maybe I'm being a little bit of a purist, but you're one of only a handful of UA-camrs that doesn't jump straight to sample replacement. Ugh... On a semi-related note, I have a somewhat unique way of recording overheads and I'm loving the results. When I get some videos posted, I'd like to point you to them because I think I could see you trying it out and improving upon the method. It's super simple, intuitive, and very budget/experience/bedroom friendly. Honestly, I don't know why I can't find a single person on UA-cam doing it.
I like your approach to this. Move the mic and fix the issue. It's incredibly complex. Could you give me a hint on your overhead technique?
I think the drum rec technique should be dictated by the style of music. In Norteno genre the sound relies heavily on the close mics, then backed up with ambient mics. Phase is extremely important since we want that close mic low end punch to gel with the low end of ambient mics.
Yes every genre should probably be mixed with different techniques for sure...Norteño is very similar in sonic character to the big country music sound.@danielsalinas9124 who do you work with brother?
@@creativesoundlab Hey, yeah sorry for the dissent. I've been watching you for a while and seriously, thanks for fighting the good fight. I guess I'm at the point now where I really just want to be able to record my kit and not need to use any gates or stacked plugins or 12 mics to achieve a quality adjustable kit image, but also stay under budget with a kind of minimalist approach, hence my attraction to a lot of your content. A hihat mic isn't even on my menu so I should probably have kept that comment to myself. Alas, my semi-minimalist approach/pursuit means that my OH setup is too simple to be hinted at without giving it away. It's a stereo pair that produces an incredibly accurate stereo image while at the same time eliminates some major phase issues that every bedroom studio suffers from. I can tell you this, for bedroom recording, I won't be using any other method probably ever again, it's just too convenient. I just got a new camera, so I'll make a couple videos this weekend and email you. I know you like unorthodox setups, so I'd love to hear what you think.
@@danielsalinas9124 I understand, there are endless use cases. Notably, the part of the video I'm commenting on is about the relationship between 2 close mics. There is a perceived phase mismatch and my (friendly) argument is that just because you flip the polarity and get stronger low end doesn't necessarily mean that the mic should be flipped. It's a hi hat mic, one could just as easily eq out the snare fundamental without potentially introducing a dozen new phase issues at other frequencies. Maybe, with the right filter type, you could boost the snare frequency in the hihat and phase reverse that center frequency due to the filter characteristics, essentially boosting the snare and correcting the phase without having to phase shift all of the frequencies. If the kick or a random tom had the same effect in the hi hat mic, surely flipping the polarity wouldn't be the top choice would it? I'm not saying it's wrong or right, I'm just saying polarity reversal shouldn't be automatic.
Sorry with all respect but this mic is way to close to the high hat. A snare would maybe ok a mic above & one below