Tracking Drums

[radiocuredmc]

There's no dirty, sweaty feeling quite like how you feel after a day spent tracking drums in a practice room for the majority of a full-length album. We got drums for 8 songs tracked and that means 3 more to do Tuesday night. I totally got a pretty good drum sound using 3 mics - one kick, one snare, and one overhead

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The Magnificent 3-Mic Drum Setup

[radiocuredmc]

We had a newly purchased Shure Beta 52a on the kick drum, a tried and true SM57 on the Snare, and an AKG Condenser on the one overhead. We're using an M-Box, so you're probably wondering how I got three mics into a 2-input interface. I ran the kick and snare through our PA, (mixed them against each other, and ran one main line out) into my Alesis 3630 Compressor (with just a little compression, 4:1, and light gating) and then into the M-Box. The overhead went straight into the M-Box for both ambient room sound and for the cymbals and toms. The overhead was about 4 feet over the kit pointed directly at the center of the snare. Surprisingly, it picked up everything well and the high-hats and ride were at perfect post-mix levels without having to do anything at all. :)

The drummer in Tough Luxury, Jason, is really adept at playing to a click track while following along to some of the worst scratch vocal/guitar tracks known to mankind. Actually, the scratch track for one song turned out so well, we were joking about including it on our "Anthology" disc someday -- complete with sung guitar solos and synth parts!

We averaged about 5 takes per song, keeping all takes to frakenstein the best drum performances; although, all songs had complete takes that were anywhere from usable to excellent. Despite the heat, the fast food, and the lame bands on either side of our studio/practice space, we did quite well. Our bass player is recording his parts to some songs today. He'll be using either his own bass or one of mine and doing a combination of DI and mic'ing his cab with the Beta 52a. Tomorrow night, we'll track drums for the remaining 3 songs (we left everything setup from yesterday, we're the only band in our space), and I'll start the guitar and keyboard trackss.

If we stay properly motivated, we could have everything tracked in a few weeks, and send it off to be mastered and released by our friend's label.

If you haven't heard Tough Luxury (and really, how could you? considering only 3 shows played downtown vs. 5 shows played in the suburbs), you can hear Reason drum versions on our MySpace page.

www.myspace.com/toughluxury

Re: The Magnificent 3-Mic Drum Setup

[livenolies]

Nice! Thanks for the details!

When you do the bass parts (you may already know this)...it may be worth your time to go into PT and nudge the "mic" track forward a hair. It will (technically) be about a half a millisecond behind the "DI" track, which may or may not cause phase issues. Your mileage may vary. :)

-n