Metalcore Drums

So I have finally begun tracking the elements of my Metalcore project, which is a 2 track EP by a local Metalcore band that I discovered online. As discussed in my previous blogs, The way I’ve gone about this project is to first record the drums, then the guitars, and finally the vocals. That way we have the drums set as a base for the rest of the guitars to follow over, which then creates and instrumental for the vocalist to sing over. The interesting thing about doing this recording was I found out that the actual drummer of the band wouldn’t be doing the tracking for the drums, but instead the bass player would be. Most of the tracks are written by the lead singer and bass player of the band and both of these members have a background in audio engineering themselves. I was a little concerned about how this would play out as we weren't having the band’s actual drummer playing but fortunately for me the recording turned out to be a success and the bass player’s drumming skills were actually quite tight.

Microphone Setup:

My first time ever micing and recording a drum kit was only a few months ago last trimester. That being said, I'm still fairly new to the process, although I find that my way of doing it works. Some other people in the class often do some crazy micing techniques with all sorts of experimental approaches but myself, being a mostly in the box worker has a much simpler approach to recording drums, I simply just point the microphone at the thing I’m trying to record and nudge it until I get the tone right (if needed).

As someone who doesn't have too much background knowledge on microphones and which ones I should pick for certain things, I’ve found that researching various microphones that we have access to at SAE is a good way to get started. Last trimester I found which microphones to pick out by watching some drum mic shootout videos, which is where they’ll show the sound of various microphones being placed around a particular drum sound and that way I can hear a sample of the types of tones I can expect from said mic. Here is an example of some of the videos I watched to get an idea for my mic list.

It was also important to know what kind of Kit the drummer was going to bring in and how many elements there were in total, for instance; how many Tom’s hats etc would he be bringing.

These were the microphones that I ended up picking out:

If you look close enough you'll also see that I messed up the channel listing on the left, this created a small hiccup in the setup process but we figured it out soon enough.

For this track we would be using triggers, I wrote about using these last trimester and how they work, for those who need a refresher on how this works I described it by saying

“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”

Even though the triggers would replace the drum hits, I didn't want my microphone choice and set up to go to waste, so I factored into some time before the tracking to get some recordings of clean drum samples ranging from softest hit to hardest hit. My plan was to make these into individual samples later to use as triggers in the mixing stage. I also got crash and ride hits that I could maybe use in drum edit to mask issues or also to gel together certain sections (this is an EDM technique where I’ll often use white noise sweep samples and other crashes to gel together sections so they sound more dynamic)

With the mic’s sorted out, I planned out a schedule and this is how the day was looking:

It was recommended to me by some classmates that recording in the NEVE would be the best place for me to record these drums due to the large live room and harmonic characteristics that come through the desk. I decided to try out the NEVE and do my recordings in there… that being said; I’m still not the best engineer of the NEVE console and I was going to need some help in doing so with all of the other things going on. I decided to ask two members of the class Ryan and Ash to help out and they said they would. It was great to have these two onboard as they both had recorded heavier styles of music before and had helped me with various parts of this assignment already.

Ryan had also helped me to record my drums last trimester and I think that he’s a great person to have help for these types of recordings. Ryan recommended a drum micing technique called Blumlein which we could use as a stereo room mic, I had a look into it and decided to implement it into my recording session instead of a mono room mic. Since we now have access to the U87 (which I’m a huge fan of) I decided to use these for our room mics.

At the start of the day we began loading the equipment in and getting it set up, I decided to have Ryan helping out in the Live Room and Ash as an engineer on the desk. I had shared the schedule and microphone placement for everyone so that we were all on board with what we were doing. I found out that apparently on weekends at SAE they want to have the room returned about 30 minutes early, which I hadn’t planned for so that meant that time was a little tighter than it already was, so some things had to be sped along a bit.

Whilst Ash set up the desk and got communications running I helped Ryan set up the drum kit, but jumped between the rooms to see if we were running on time.I had gotten the band to send me the demo tracks that they had and asked for a version with the drums and one without the drums, this was done so that I could send over the demo track along with a click to the drummer (helps them understand where we are in the song and also to get into the groove of things).

After we recorded some samples and began doing a couple of practice takes of the track, I had noticed that the rack tom was sounding off and had a weird high end click sound to it, I decided to move the microphone around and the high end sound of it went away. On top of this we still had the mix around with the mic list numbering, and we also had a small signal flow issue as somebody switched the XLR's around at the back of the desk without normalizing it. Because of these minor issues, we were running about 30 minutes behind schedule at this point. This wasn't a problem however as we basically smashed out the first track way before what I expected we would, meaning we finished it in about 70 minutes or so, during this point the lead singer of the band arrived and sat to make sure he was happy with how the drums were sounding in the tracks. We ended up smashing out both songs fairly quickly but there were a couple of tricky parts in the first track that we had to use quick punch for to punch in. After listening back to the tracks we began hearing the tom was sounding rather high end again, AFTER we had already recorded everything. I'm not sure how this happened because I swear we heard it fix when we moved the microphone but we actually found that the XLR was the issue, so we swapped it out and it was fixed properly. Luckily for me this was only occurring on the rack tom and not the floor, which isn't used very much in the tracks except for one particular section, which we punched in and recorded again. I made sure to go back in and get some new clean samples of the toms so that I could replace the other areas where it's used with a sample.

Overall the session went really well and was a good opportunity to explore some of my LO's such as problem solving in the studio, especially in regards to signal flow which I've previously struggled with. After we had finished the recordings I backed it up onto my hard drive and we packed up the session. I'll be writing next about my drum editing process!

Thanks for reading