Nov 06, 2006 08:19 am Packing blankets may help, they're pretty thick. maybe an inch or two from the wall, if you can.
Maybe you can put the drum kit in a corner, kinda facing out diagonally, to slow down the sound bounce.
Help with terrible drum sounds.
Posted on Nov 06, 2006 06:58 am
Snake_Bite
Wannabe Producer/Tech Student
Member Since: Aug 11, 2005
Ive tried a million differnt things but i cannot get my close miced snare and drum sounds to sound good. I use a pg52 on the kick drum, have used it in every position imaginable, with 3 or 4 differnt drums, and they all sound a dull thud. Cant even get them sounding good with extreme eq, let alone a little bit to clean up the sound.
The snares sound very bassy and boxy, they have no snap or high end, and as with the kick drum they are unsavable through processing.
My guess would be it is the room im recording in, because my friend uses the samson q kick and the q snare on his kit and it sounds 10 times better, but he recordings in a semi-large garage, while im in a shed where the kit is the same width as the room with a low ceiling.
It is impossible for me to change room, so is there any treatment i could do to this room to make the drums sound better? the walls and ceiling are all flat and hard, so do i need to put up some stuff to absorb the sound rather than reflect it?
feedback appreciated
cheers
chris
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Nov 06, 2006 08:19 am Packing blankets may help, they're pretty thick. maybe an inch or two from the wall, if you can.
Maybe you can put the drum kit in a corner, kinda facing out diagonally, to slow down the sound bounce.
Nov 06, 2006 09:20 am are your mics up really really close? I have found in the room where I record, moving the mic further away from the snare head captures more of the drum sound and just attack. Also look at under micing the snare as well.
For the Kick have you tried removing the front head and placing the mic again slghtyly further away. i find that a lot of people mic up kits too closely and dont get the real sound just stick attack
But what the hell do i know I'm only a drummer ;-)
Nov 06, 2006 02:26 pm I have that problem also.
On my toms especially, I get nothing but "booooom" and suspect I might be mic'n a little close. They are bearable with mass EQ and the OH's using the "recorderman technique" but I would love to capture a better tom from the git go. It's really hard to do when your PC is in the same room as the drums though, I get alot of bleed through the headphones when I position the mics so I can never tell until after they are recorded.
I would love some input for tom technique.
Nov 06, 2006 02:41 pm Does the kit itself sound good in the room?
If it doesn't sound good in the first place, no amount of post-processing can save it.
Make sure that the heads are of decent quality, that the drums are tuned, and that the drummer is using proper techniques for recording (easy on the brass so the other drums sound bigger in comparison).
Nov 06, 2006 02:53 pm My drums sound pretty good, all new skins top n bottom and decently tuned. And yeah, light on the brass is great info, I think I read that on here about U2's drummer pushing that same thing.
On my problem, the drum sounds very good, just very boomy. Also, I tend to tighten my resonant pretty hard as I want the sustain, maybe not so much sustain on a recording kit would help?
Nov 06, 2006 03:12 pm Although I'm pretty inexperienced when it comes to committing drums to tape, the thing that's made the most difference to me has been using a gate on each piece that's close-miced. This has just been kick and snare for me so far, but I'd imagine that the principles are the same for toms as well.
Gate them to the point to where the only thing that opens the gate is the tom being struck.
With the kick and snare, I take several bands of parametric EQ with a very narrow Q and try to find the resonant frequencies of the kick and snare to get rid of any ring and leave only 'pop'. I'd imagine the same thing would go for a tom. Let the overheads carry the overtones and ring of your toms, and use the close mics for attack and punch. Then you can always adjust the individual close mics in the mix and get more or less pop and punch.
Well, that's my rudimentary advice anyways. Like I said, I don't have a whole lot of experience with live drums but I'm starting to get results I like with my last couple of attempts. Gating was the key.
Nov 06, 2006 03:25 pm Sweet, thanks... will try.
Nov 08, 2006 03:45 pm I've been a few discussions lately concerning drums and rooms around the net lately (not that I'm experienced at good recording tech...). There's an article in the October (?) issue of Sound On Sound and possibly in the November issue, where recording drums are mentioned in the context of mixing, etc. (not in their own article). It appears that the "room" plays a very big part in getting a good drum sound.
My previous experiences with recording drums has been hit & miss, with the "good" sounding recordings coming quite by accident. The one common denomiator I have in my "good" recordings is that the drum kit is set-up on a performance stage, in a hall, and it has those light-hiding curtains up above, which correlates to the articles in SOS where they talk about having sufficient room above the overheads. Barring that, a "flat" or "dead" surface above so that you don't get any "coloration" of the sound in the mics.
The other article talks about using "side-chaining" to control gating for the toms *only*, using an EQ to filter the frequency so that a low kick or high cymbal sound doesn't accidentally trigger the gate. Then they allow the gate to close quickly, so that the "boominess" of the drum doesn't come through. The way it sounds, they use the kick and overheads as their "main" mics, and just "supplement" with the snare, hat & tom mics, using them to "boost" those particular sounds as needed.
*But*, they got a good sound with the overheads and kick 1st, which for me, is a trick in and of itself... But all of my 12x12, with 8 ft ceiling, room recordings with drums are kah-kah. The ones in the basement with the 1st floor's joists exposed overhead sound better, but still kah-kah, all using various mics...
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