Drum Tracks-Will any drummer do?

December 26th, 2009

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You are a songwriter looking for live drums for one of your songs.  You  jump on your favorite search engine and search for, “drum tracks.”  The search produces many different drummers, offering to record custom drum tracks. What should you do, use the least expensive? Probably not! Would you get the least expensive doctor to take out your appendix?  When it comes to drum tracks, why would you take the song you have put so much work into and give it to  an amateur with limited drumming skills and even less audio engineering skills? You want a professional who records everyday. You want drum tracks that will take your song to the next level. The playing should be great! The sound should be as great! What makes that happen? ME! :-)   No seriously.  First, start with great drums that are perfectly tuned, then strategically place microphones to capture the optimum sound. Run the mic’s thru great mic preamps that capture every detail. The preamps should be run into great A/D  (analogue to digital) converters, which take the drum sound and convert it into digital information.  You want a converter that captures every small nuance of the drums and transients of the cymbals. You want the drummer to be highly skilled, so each stroke of the drum or cymbal, is in the right place. You can have the best equipment in the world, but if the drummer has poor drumming technique, the sound will suffer. You’ll spend hours trying to repair the performance and the sound quality of the tracks.The technique of the drummer counts as much towards the sound as does the proper choice of equipment. Why do I care about this? Well here comes the shameless self promotion. I have recorded thousands of drum tracks. In that time I have worked with many producers, songwriters and musicians. Most don’t understand the amount of time involved in getting a great drum track. On average I spend about 4 to 5 hours per song. I talk to the client thru email, on the phone or skype. I want to understand what they are looking for. After they upload their song to my ftp, I  listen and consider my approach. If the client has given some direction, such as ( I want a vintage sound), I may put up one of my vintage drum kits and start placing  the microphones.  After the microphones are properly placed and checked, I’ll start writing a chart for the song. Ocasionally I get charts from my clients, but most of the time I don’t . I start recording the drum track, and by the way, you can now watch your drums being recorded in the studio, live on skype. I may have to go through several different grooves to find just the right one. Depending on the style, I might place some samples in conjunction with the raw tracks and I may process the drum tracks (gating, eq’ing, compressing,etc….).  I then decide if any percussion instruments are needed. For example,  I might add a shaker in a verse or a tambourine in the chorus. Once I am happy with the track, I send an MP3 of the song to my client. He/she decides if any changes are needed.  After the track is approved,  I’ll bounce the files (12 to 18 tracks).  Then I”ll upload them to my FTP and notify my client that they are ready to download. I love doing this and I hope it shows in my final product!! Check out my site Real Drum Studio

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Panning your drum tracks

December 18th, 2009

So you’ve download your drum tracks and your not quite sure how to pan your drums so that they represent a real sounding drum kit. There are several schools of thought! You can pan them from the audience perspective or you can pan them from the drummers perspective. To simplify the idea let’s use the drummers perspective. The first thing to do is bring up the overheads with overhead 1 panned hard right and overhead 2 panned hard left. Listen to the stereo image of the drum kit. You should match the panning of each drum track to the corresponding location in the stereo image. For example, if tom 1 is at the 2 o’clock position in the overheads then pan tom 1 to that position. This will giver greater separation of the drums in the stereo field and not smear the stereo image of the drum mix. I bring up all of the drum tracks to fit into the overhead image then I slowly bring up the room mic’s to ad depth.

Things to consider when panning your drum tracks. Do I want the drums to have a wide stereo image or should I confine them to a smaller area of the mixing stage. Maybe you might only want to pan the overheads at 9 and 3 o’clock or less. Do want a defined drum sound with added room depth? Try hyper compressing the room mic’s using a fast attack to reduce transients and a timed release to reduce compression pumping. There as many variations as there are songs so have fun and experiment!

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Compressing your Drum Tracks

December 8th, 2009

Compressing drums for mixing is an essential tool that when done correctly can really add to not only the sound of the drum kit but it’s impact the entire mix. The first thing is to understand compression and how compression affects drums. Downward compression is the most commonly used compression technique. Compression can be used to reduce the dynamic rage of any audio track, to smooth out the peaks or bring the loud parts down. Some compression techniques need to be transparent like in some used in Mastering. Although, in pop music it is used to affect the sound of recorded material. Most compressors have fetures that can be ajusted, threshold, ratio, attack and release times, make up gain are common ones. There are other compressors that have more features such as soft knee, rms or peak detction, look ahead, stereo linking, etc… For this discussion we will be concerned with just threshold, ratio, attack and release, and make up gain. Before we can delve into compression techniques we need to make sure we have a grasp on how a compressor works.

Threshold- is the threshold/level at which compression kicks in. This lets you pick the db level for compression to start.

Ratio-the ratio of input to output. Ratio is usually displayed for example 4:1 or 4 to 1 would be for every 4db of input over the threshold setting the output only produces 1db of gain.

Attack time- Ususally displayed in milliseconds. How fast the compressor reacts to input above the threshold.

Release time-Usually displayed in milliseconds, How fast the compressor returns to unity gain after the level goes below the threshold.

Make up gain-increases the level after compression. After the compression effects the material the overall level can be brought up.

With these concepts in mind there are many ways to approach compressing drums. One technique is to insert a compressor on the drum buss and compress the over all drum mix. If I employ this technique I usually am looking reduce some of the higher peaks of the drum kit. Most of the time I will only run the kick, snare, and toms into this type of configuration because I don;t want this to affect the attack or sustain of the cymbals. The ratio, attack and release time will vary some depending on how fast and percussive the material is. Here is a guide. To start you can set the ratio at around 4 to 1 with a fairly fast attack around 8 to 15ms and a fairly fast release time of 30 to 100ms. Becareful not to use too fast of an attack time (unless thats the sound you want) or you will loose transient information. Change the Threshold up and down until you get the sound of compression you are looking for.

Another technique Parallel compression also know as New York compression is very effective. The basic technique involves running an aux buss with heavy compression routed to the mix buss in parallel to the drum tracks unaffected sent to the mix buss or cloning the drum tracks and having one set of tracks running into the mix buss without effects and the other set of drum tracks with a compressor on a separate buss, both are then sent to the mix buss. This technique will give you the ability to mix the compressed drums in with the uncompressed drums, You can use high compression ratios and a low threshold to mix with the unefected drums bringing up the lower level sutlies in the drum track without loosing the transients inharent when using fast attack times. Her are some other options you can try

Add low level compression on the uneffected mix to add more continuity. Another technique is to EQ the heavliy compressed aux buss which will produce some interesting effects. Try the EQ before the compressor and then after the EQ in the effects chain.

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