Notes On Recording Live Drums

I’ve been recording drums all weekend for an artist named Christian Lewis. Really good stuff. I think I got some of the best drum recordings I’ve ever gotten here in my studio, The Zone. I get a lot of compliments on my drum sounds so here are a few notes on what I did:

(I'm not going to get into head tensions / tuning and drum heads. That is a whole other subject)
I started by mic'ing up the drummer Andrew Faletti’s kit, and recorded some short clips for him to hear. After he approved the drum sounds we had, I started replacing his drums with mine- starting with my Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum. This model of snare drum has been called “The most recorded snare drum in history”. I don’t doubt it. Almost every time I compare this snare with whatever my clients bring in, the difference is obvious. I mic’d the top with a Shure SM57. I have a couple that I always use for snare as the SM57 can be a very inconsistent model of microphone: they all sound a little different. When using this mic it is good to try a few (if you have more than one) and pick the best one (I write on the side of the mic with a sharpie after I find one I like for the application I’m using it for). The mic was placed about 2 inches or so above the rim of the snare pointing down to just off center on the head (where Andrew was hitting the drum. I ran that mic into an API 512C and then an API 550b EQ which was eq’d at 10K + 4db and 8K +2db. From there I ran it into an Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor compressor at a 4:1 ratio, slow attack, quick release and 4 or 5db of gain reduction and then into my AD interface.
I usually mic the bottom of the snare with an AKG C 414 B which works great, but I wanted a little more snap, so this time I used something I’ve never used for mic'ing a snare: a Josephson C24, which I ran into an API 512C (remember... flip the phase on bottom mics) and then ran into another Distressor with the same settings as the top snare mic’s Distressor. The bottom mic was set at the same angle and distance from the bottom head of the drum as the top mic was from the top head.

With the toms I started by using my toms, which are Bearing Edge drums. These are some of the best drums I’ve ever heard. I mic'ed the toms with Sennheiser MD 421s which I ran into my Soundcraft Ghost console (a pretty good sounding board for the money). I usually pull some low mids out and boost a little highs and then some lows in that unique sweet spot for each tom (using a narrow bandwidth. The tom mics are about 3 to 4 inches above the heads, at a 45 degree angle to the head and pointing to where the drummer strikes the head.

The kick drum was the drummer's AHA Custom kick which is made here in Gainesville Georgia. On the kick drum I mic’d the inside with an AKG D112. I keep the mic almost centered inside the drum, with the mic pointing right at the point where the beater from the kick pedal is hitting on the other side of the head. That mic is run into an API 512C and then into an API 560 graphic EQ with 500hz pulled all the way down and a boost at 125hz and 4K. The outside of the kick drum was mic'd with something a lot of engineers call a Sub kick, which (in my version at least) is just a speaker hung on a couple of cables suspended in front of the kick, and wired to a XLR plug (a speaker in reverse, and mine is still low-impedance). This works better than any mic I’ve ever used. You can buy a factory version of this - the Yamaha Subkick, but having used their version I have to say mine gets better lows. I think the lack of a shell and all that housing lets it breathe more. It was placed about 6 inches (tho I've often placed further out) from the head and off center. The sub kick I ran into a Chandler Limited Germanium with the “Thick” button in. (I gotta thank Producer Matt Goldman for the suggestion that I get one of these. Matt knows a lot about gear).

On my overheads I used a pair of Earthworks TC30Ks. These are omni-directional microphones. I’ve tried so many mics for overheads, but something makes me keep coming back to these. They just make everything sound soooo big! I also like the way I get better coverage on the cymbals this way. With directional mics I always feel like there is one crash cymbal that isn’t as loud as the others. I placed my overheads about one drumstick height or so above the cymbals. I also make sure that they are over the edge of the cymbal and on the axis of the cymbal's rotation when they are struck (meaning that when the cymbal is pivoting or swinging after being hit, the mic is over the part that isn't moving up and down. That would be 90 degrees around the edge of the cymbal from the spot they are being struck. This gives a smoother sound).

One of the biggest parts of the sound is my room mic. What I’ve been doing lately is putting an AKG C 414 B straight over the snare drum up about 9 feet and run that into my Ghost console. Then I turn up the gain on the top of the channel until the red overload light is on. Then I turn it more right up until the distortion is crazy, then I dial back just a bit. I might EQ it, bit not always. (check phase!) This track gets gated and is keyed off the snare. Just a tiny bit of this in the mix will give the drums a very muscular sound and make the snare sound like you added a few inches of depth to the shell.

I used a couple of spot mics as well. One Josephson C24 on the high hat and a shure SM57 on the ride. I don’t always use them in the mix, but I get them just in case.

Here are a couple of clips I made from the session. These are the raw tracks just after we recorded:

You might notice from the sound clips that the drums are very ‘ringy’ and live sounding. I rarely muffle the heads and when I do it is very little. Many engineers will get a little freaked out by all the ring and over tones they hear as they are getting the drums dialed in, and start to muffle the drums. The problem is that by the time you add a lot of other instruments to the production your drums will actually start to sound small and thin, so you'll then start reaching for reverbs and other tricks to make your drums big again. If you just let the drums ring a bit you’ll find that you need less or no reverb in the mix.

And finally, a good drummer and good drums cannot be overlooked and in fact are the biggest part of the equation. I've had drums set up in the studio and put a different drummmer on the kit to have it sound like a whole different kit.

Well that’s about it.

Recording "Party Like A Rockstar"

Filtering vocals - High Pass and Low Pass

(This is an embellishment on a post I did on gearslutz.com)



Like many engineers, I put a High Pass filter on my vocals when I’m mixing. Usually from 100hz to 150hz. (A little higher with female vocals.)
I do this because for the most part there really isn’t much down there that is useful or going to be heard in the mix (before I get any haters, let me say that if I were mixing a vocal and acoustic guitar only or a solo vocal than maybe I might approach this differently. I am mostly talking about dense mixes and production).


I do the filtering pre-compression so that any low frequencies won’t pump the compressor. This filtering will really clear up the mix a lot. For that matter I do a lot of high pass filtering on other sounds too, because low end is weird in that a tiny tiny amount of it can really screw up a mix. Even stuff you can’t hear will mess with a mix.



But here is something else I do that I think is a little unusual: I often put a low pass filter on vocals as well, most of the time using a McDSP plugin called Filterbank (F2 configuration).

I usually do this on backing vocals or on ‘adlib’ tracks in hip hop. Usually I’m taking out everything above 10khz and even as low down as 6.5khz.
I’ve found that sometimes the vocals just get so harsh and I’m putting de-essers on all the vocals, so might as well take a short cut. It’s also because so many times when I’m mixing for clients it sounds like all the vocals were recorded using the same mic with the same settings. It’s kinda hard to to get a good blend sometimes when all the vocal stacks sound the same.


I read an article about how Michael Jackson recorded his vocals. He would do his leads on a condenser mic and back-ups or stacks on a dynamic (in the article they said a Sure SM7). I think the point is to switch up the source; it gives a bigger sound. So when I’m mixing I’m trying to achieve the same thing with the tracks that are sent to me.

Here’s something else I noticed while mixing. I would often get a nice natural sounding vocal and then in one part of the song want to get that 'telephone' filtered effect. I would always be surprised that after doing that that the natural sounding vocal just sounded boring. It made me start filtering the lows out of my vocals more and being a little more extreme in my approach. I also sometimes go halfway into that telephone type sound for my leads, even boosting the mid-range on my vocals. Remember, all sound systems sound different and you can never really be sure how your mix is gonna sound. But you can be sure that all sound systems do have mid-range and your vocals will be heard there if you treat mid-range as your friend.

I hope this helps.

Identity Crisis

I’ve been thinking lately about identity. More specifically, an artist's identity or lack thereof. I think many artists have an identity crisis going on and they don’t even know it. What they think they are is often what they are not. And this is very important when we are all trying to be on the same page as far as production and mixing goes, because it all eventually ends up in how you are marketing your music. This is one of THE biggest problems I run into with new artists.

Let me use some examples to illustrate:
I had a band a few years ago that I needed to produce a few songs for. On their rough demo cd there was this one song they'd added as an afterthought that was actually the best song in the batch. It was a mid-tempo rock ballad. Out of the 4 songs we ended up recording, that song came out the best and got the band a lot of attention. Everyone I sent it to lost their minds (even to this day if that song is on a producer reel I give someone, the first question from the listener is “Who is that?”). At the time we did these songs Creed had kind of dropped of the charts and Nickelback hadn’t hit yet. I explained to the band that there was a hole in popular music for that big ‘fake’ metal rock stuff (I didn’t quite use those terms with them but that IS what it is) and that they could fill it. They had the sound, the singer had the voice, the timing was right and the interest was there.

The problem was that the band thought of themselves as a technical rock band more along the lines of System of a Down. They had NO songs that came close to sounding like that, and the few that were technical were very weak in the actual songwriting department and weren’t even interesting in the technical department either. (The singer had some pipes, but the musicianship was very weak - another misconception in the band). What they did really well and what they sounded like was the big Creed/Nickelback thing. I couldn’t convince them to do more songs like that, and in spite of the attention the ballad was getting they wouldn’t even play it at all of the gigs! Needless to say they toiled for a few more years, actually got an indie deal and recorded another album of misdirected songs (without using any producer) and they went nowhere.

Sometimes a band needs to step away from their egos and realistically look back on what they are doing, question their assumptions about themselves AND listen to the advice of their elders.

Here is another example: I was mixing for a band and the music was kind of a pop/rock mishmash. Not recorded or produced very well, which always makes mixing so much harder. They kept bugging me to put weird effects on things that seemed incredibly inappropriate for the songs and was making everything sound worse and ridiculous. I kept asking them to explain what they were going for and was told “We want to sound like the Beatles”. Man.... how could they be more off? I had to explain that I was not a magician. If they wanted to sound like the Beatles they needed to write songs that sounded like the Beatles first, and then record and produce songs as well as the Beatles did. How could they have gotten all the way to mixing and not realized this?

More recently I was at a rehearsal for a band I’ll be working with soon that has a very powerful modern commercial rock sound. They're a very good band, have great songs and the singer can belt (very Jeff Buckley-like). During a break the singer says he wants the drums to sound very garage band or maybe like Hendrix or Led Zeppelin and explains that he has spent a lot of time playing blues and old school rock. Now I LOVE those bands, but what he doesn’t recognize is that he has grown up in the modern age and IS a product of now. I think what he really wants to do is pay homage to the legends, which is honorable, but not a true representation of what he actually IS.

This project is in it’s early stages and I have yet to see what will happen. It is very difficult to make young artists see that what they grew up listening to and dreaming about becoming is not usually realistic because the times, sounds and music business have changed and, most importantly, you must find your own voice, your true voice, to speak through.
- Do you really know what you’re best at?
- Can you accurately identify the things that are connecting with your listeners?
- Are you trying to be your favorite band from your childhood or are you trying to be what you should sound like in 3 years?

Be honest with yourself. I’m not saying don't reach and stretch who you are, but do sit back and try to be objective. Be real about the things that ARE working and have worked. Stick with what you are good at.

Wow!

Mix Compression: Two Approaches

I was on gearslutz.com and came across a very heated discussion about mixing compression on the mix bus. Someone had made a comment about not using it and it went on and on about whether you should, how you should use it, what gear or plugins you should use, and so on. I really don’t want to get into all that right now, but I will re-post what I posted on gearslutz here:

There is no one answer to whether you should use compression on your mix buss or not. Everyone has a different approach and I have gone through my own phases where I did or didn’t compress the mix. (Presently I’m off it, but I do happily compress about everything else and I’m using a slight limiter on the mix.)

I once had the honor of moderating a panel for NARAS that had Brendan O'Brien and Jimmy Douglass on it. What a treat! I threw away the questions that had been prepared for me and asked all the things I had heard rumors about and wondered myself for years. One of these was about mix compression. When asked what each of them used on their mixes Jimmy's answer was "None", Brendan's was "YES! Lots! Sometimes 2 or 3 compressors in a row".

Now I think this shows a fault in how people ask these kind of questions- or rather, the results they hope to achieve. They want to find an answer or technique that they can just plug in to their current routine to get the same results as the one that they are getting the advice from. But it is totally out of context. Whatever Jimmy is doing in other parts of his mix means he doesn't need to use comp on the buss. Brendan on the other hand is working towards using that, and I'll bet is running some sort of compression from the start.

Mixing (and production) is like cooking. There are lots of ingredients that must be added at the right time, in the right order, in the right amounts to get the right results. Yet strangely it might come out differently the next time. And someone else might cook something equally as good, but take a different route.

* * *
A few other interesting notes from that panel:
I asked both of them how long they spent mixing a song. Jimmy: 2 or 3 days. Brendan: 5 to 6 hours.
Was it true that Brendan uses the same bass guitar that he’s had for years with the same original strings on every song? (this based on a rumor I’ve heard around Atlanta from a few people) “No!”, he laughed. While he does have a favorite bass and the strings might be old (he didn’t really know when they’d been changed, so they are probably old) he doesn’t use it on everything, just when appropriate. Again, think of the context. I’ll bet there are several rock producers who heard this rumor and stopped changing their bass strings.

Learning How to Mix

How did I learn how to mix?

Man, I can’t really say. I’ve been doing it so long and have tried so many approaches- I've had a few work out great and had an incredible number of failures. I’ve read books & magazines, I've harassed older engineers. I’ve mixed loud, quiet, with headphones, on state of the art speakers and on cheap stereo speakers. I’m still learning and still frustrated with the outcome a lot of the time. But the one thing I’ve done that made the biggest difference was to train myself to listen. And one of the best ways to do that is by comparing your mix to a great mix of a hit song that you are familiar with. Here is how you do that:

Take your stereo returns of the mix you are doing and the stereo return from a cd player (or your computer output if you can play cd’s from it independently of your Protools/Logic/DAW output), and put them side by side on your mixer. Go back and forth between your CD and your mix and check the levels on your mixer so that they are the same. Have your mixing un-muted and the CD channels muted. Now, as you are listening to your mix put your fingers of one hand over the mute buttons on your mix and your fingers of your other hand over the mute buttons of the CD channels and press at the same time, quickly switching between your mix and the mix of the hit song. Now the differences will really jump out! Your goal is to make your mix sound like the other. Just try copying it.... I dare you. It is harder than you think. Keep in mind that it helps if the songs are of a similar type, vibe, tempo and so on. The bass is very important, too- If your mix has a lot of short and fast bass notes, but the mix you are comparing to has really long notes, you will never match up because of how bass reacts in the mix, on your speakers and in the room (this is a whole other subject to be covered in my workshops or lessons).

When I first started doing this it nearly drove me crazy. I could hear that my mix didn’t sound as good but I couldn’t place my finger on what the problem was. I had to start removing elements from my mix one at a time and see how that changed the comparison process. After doing this for years I trained my ears to hear things I could never hear before.

Here are two other techniques you can use by applying the same process:
1. Compare two mixes of two different hit songs against each other.
This requires two CD players. You will be amazed by how different the mixes will be sometimes. This is because mixing is not just a science- it is also an art. And a good mixer takes many aspects into account to get a good mix. Mixing is not just about sound but about emotion, and that has to be shown in the spotlight.
2. Use the comparison process to define ranges.
Years ago I pretty much just mixed rock music, which is much more challenging to mix than urban stuff (for me at least). I was always concerned about my low end, how loud the vocals were and how much mid-range I had in the mix. What I did was use 2 songs that were somewhat current to compare to. One was the Goo Goo Dolls song Iris mixed by Jack Joseph Puig. The other was The Verve and their songs Bitter Sweet Symphony and Lucky Man (or anything else off that amazing album) mixed by Christopher Marc Potter. I noticed from comparing them that the Goo Goo Dolls had a tremendous low end, a scooped mid-range and a somewhat lower vocal level. The Verve mixes tended to have way more mid-range and the vocals were mixed a bit louder. So I would do my mix and then make sure that my mixes had no more low end than the Goo Goo Dolls and that the vocals were as loud or louder than theirs. I would then make sure that my mixes were no more mid-rangy than the Verve mixes and that my vocals were no louder than theirs.

Of course then it was out to the car test, the hallway test and so on.

This is just one of many techniques you can use to train your ears and improve your mixing. I hope this helps some of you.