Drum Tracking

On Tuesday night I successfully recorded the drums for my project!

I went on a search around the class to see if could do session drums for my production or if they would know anyone that could. It’s quite a fast track to drum to as it's about 175bpm, so I was looking for a drummer who would be capable of playing at this speed on time to avoid additional work in the editing stages. Ryan, a classmate of mine had recently been tracking drums for his metal project, which I’d been in on a couple of sessions of, and he had his brother, who is also a student at SAE was playing the drums. I talked to a couple of other people who said they might be able to get some punk rock type drummers that they know to do the recording for me, but with the time I had left I turned this idea down. I thought it would be much more beneficial for my time to have someone within the school to do this, instead of relying on another third party, where I have to organise their availabilities and risk having them cancel last minute. Although yes I still had to organise availabilities and other things like that, I feel like SAE students are on campus a lot more, a lot more flexible with time, and can make a lot more commitments. I contacted Ryan, sent him over the scratch track and asked if his brother would be keen on doing a recording and if he’d like to help me track as a live room technician.

Ryan's brother agreed and asked for me to send over a version of the track without the drums, and one with only the drums, for him to learn. In return I got some details of the drum kit he was using so I could begin researching what microphones I was going to use.

I’ve been researching all sorts of things about drum kits all trimester ever since I decided I was going to be recording them, and had many conversations with different people around the school. I found out about drum triggering, and particularly the plugin Trigger 2 by Steven Slate, which we had access to on campus. Triggering essentially takes the transients of each drum hit and replaces it with a new sample, so instead of a lets say kick drum sounding different in tonality due to the variation of how its being hit, it replaces it with the same sample every time to give it a more even sound. These can then be manipulated so that each transient hits at the exact same volume and velocity, giving it a very solid sound, this is a technique that is often used in metal and is what gives off that powerful drum sound, it also seems to be the same technique used in my reference track drums (I Can Talk by Two Door Cinema Club). I would write more about triggering but it’s something that I might keep for its own separate blog to give a full detailed look at the production technique. This is something that I kept in mind as a production technique that I’d be doing for my project, so I made sure to factor in some time at the end of our tracking session to get some one shots of each drum part for me to chop up and use as samples later.

In order to get an idea of the different sounds of drum mics, I watched some mic shootout videos that compared different kick and snare mics so I could compare how they sound and pick an appropriate one for the sound I was going for. I usually opt for a really bright sound in all of my mixes, however I decided I wouldn’t go for the brightest sounding mic, as I felt like recording something with a bright microphone is destructive and could be hard to get sounding less bright, but adding high end to a more dull sounding mic could be done a lot more easily, so I went for a microphone that was bright but not over the top. I watched various videos, picked out the ones I liked and went onto the SAE equipment list to see if they we had them for use.

Since the drummer was using a 'Tama Superstar Hyperdrive' Drum kit, which he uses mostly for metal recordings, I referred back to some metal drum mic techniques that I had come across by SpectreSoundStudios, a youtube channel that posts heaps of tips and tricks videos for metal music. I followed through this "How to record Heavy Drums" series:

This was my first solo recording that uses more than 3 mics, so I had a look at the planning for my class recording project and created a microphone list with the same kind of details that I saw on there. I ended up coming up with a small studio plan document for me to bring into the studio that looked like this.

I also received a message from Ryan saying that I should add an additional Picolo snare to the list as the drummer would actually be playing on 2 types of snares, as well as a top and bottom microphone for it. For these I decided to keep it basic and stick with 2 SM57’s, and kept the more unique microphones on the main snare.

It was a pretty basic session so I included some of my additional equipment down the bottom, so I could walk into the tech department and have it all sorted out on one page. I went to the tech department and luckily Stewart was there, who holds all of the drum workshops on uni and has had plenty of experience with them. For whatever reason SAE doesn’t hold any of the Audix microphones, which is weird because the only way I selected those was from the SAE Equipment list from campus online? Maybe the list is actually from another campus or something?

Stewart helped me pick out some alternatives to use instead and recommended that I use an AT2050 on the kick out, this to me was an interesting choice but I decided to give it a go and if something didn’t sound right I could go back and select another microphone for the Kick out. I also had the Electrovoice RE20 as a backup option for the snare top, so I used this instead of the Audix D6.

A kind of weird, blurry image showing the drum kit with: Kick, 2 Snares, Hats, Crash and Ride.

As for the session itself it ran really well, someone who I had to run the desk couldn’t make it due to their work in another project getting really intense, however, this wasn’t a problem as I jumped on the console position myself and ran the session rather than watching someone else run it (which is something that to me shows that I’ve definitely been improving at running the desk), by doing this I could have Ryan go into the live room and I could communicate with him through the headphone mix to adjust microphone positions to get the right sound. We did a kind of Frankenstein approach to recording by getting a good take of each section which we comped together as one drum track, this was a fairly easy process as it was just listening back to each section and doing another take. We also got some random fills and things for me to chop and use in the breakdown section of the track. The click track was pretty loud in the headphone mix and you can hear this bleed into some of the drum mics, but this isn’t really a problem as it can be fixed, and is only really audible in the quiet sections of the track. In the end we decided to get a recording of an entire play through of the track just in case I needed it.

In the end the drums sounded really good and I'm super happy with the end result! The next process for this is to learn how to mix these, which I plan on using beat detective and triggering tools for. I'd love to get a new guitar riff in for this track so I can get off of the sample pack one but at this point I'm not really finding anybody available who can do it for me, but maybe something will come up if I keep asking around.

Thanks for reading.