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Recording A Full Drum Set Vs. Mixing In Digital Drums


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Hey guys, Zack here,

 

So my band is coming over for rehearsal tomorrow and Im pretty pumped. But I've run into a slight hitch.

I own a full 8 piece sound percussion drum set, but I don't have an amazing way to record it.

 

The recording gear I use is an AudioBox USB 2x2 system that came preloaded with Studio One 2 Artist, It works great with my guitar and vocal recording, but what I could find digitally in the drum department was less than savory..

Alternativly, I do have a mic I can record with and worst case scenario just record the whole set with one mic by adjusting the mic placement. But I have not yet tested that theory out yet nor am I positive it will work.

And I don't really have the cash to purchase digital drum sounds that sound great and I don't know of a place I can download free ones that sound good.

 

Does anyone have an Idea of what I should or could do? Any and all suggestions appreciated. If there was already a topic on this and I overlooked it I apologize. But I figured it would be best to post my own new topic. And if anyone needs to know we play metal and different things like that. I just need a thick, heavy, classic drum sound if I were to do it digitally. That and I have no experience using digital drum machines or drum machines in general.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Zack

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Recording Drums without adequate mic's and a mixer can be quite a challenge.

 

If you only have two mics you might want to set one overhead to pick up the sound coming from the top of the kit and a separate mic in front of the kick.

It won't be ideal.  

 

Tom might have some better suggestions.

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Recording Drums without adequate mic's and a mixer can be quite a challenge.

 

If you only have two mics you might want to set one overhead to pick up the sound coming from the top of the kit and a separate mic in front of the kick.

It won't be ideal.  

 

Tom might have some better suggestions.

Rehearsal going on as we speak. We played around with it and found a decent way to record it until we have more funds. I'll post a recording we did on here later tonight.

 

Cheers,

 

Zack

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I'l be interested to hear it. I've never attempted it with less than 3 mics. Even then, results vary greatly with the types of mics.

Good luck!  :thumb23:

 

Tom

Here's a rough recording we did. Ive never recorded anything but guitar before so please excuse the sloppiness as I am new to audio mixing and recording and this is just meant to be a demo to test everything out. It sounds a lot better with the proper speakers in person XD

 

https://soundcloud.com/ishred4life/psongreupload

 

I still cant get the stupid sound cloud player in my posts. Tried pasting the url, share link, and embed texts. I don't know why it's not showing.

 

Cheers,

 

Zack

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I can hear the elements of the drum kit, -kick, snare, toms and cymbals - and I can hear the guitar and bass.  There's not vocal track.  If you just want to make recordings to capture your practices and ideas, I think this kind of setup will work fine for you, assuming your vocals get captured too.  But, I think you could get a much better sounding demo even with your limited gear.  

 

I'm assuming you have a DAW with a click track or metronome function.  You say you have one mic, so I'll assume you don't have two and can't record the drum kit in stereo or with two mics simultaneously.

 

After you've practiced a song as a band and have it worked out, what you could do is this.  First, get a click track/metronome in the DAW (or use a simple kick+snare beat if your DAW has basic drum sounds) that is at the right tempo and time signature for the song.  Then, record all your guitar tracks, the bass track, each of the vocal tracks and the live drums on their own separate tracks by playing and singing to the click track. That way, you'll have separate mono tracks for each guitar track, the bass track, each vocal track, and the full drum kit in mono, and you can record each of those tracks without worrying about having to simultaneously capture some other instrument with the one mic and without having another instrument's sound bleed through into the sounds of something else, and isolating sounds on separate tracks will give you lots more options for mixdown - you could add one kind of reverb to the vocal, keep reverb off the bass, have another kind of reverb on guitar tracks, EQ each track differently, add compression to each track differently, etc.

 

Another thing you could do in trying to get a better full drum kit mix after you've record one mono full-kit track with your one mic is this.  Make multiple copies of the mono drum kit track in your DAW - it's any easy function in every DAW.  For one track, EQ it so just the lower frequencies pass through, and keep it fairly "dry" without reverb - that can be your kick drum track for further mixing.  EQ another mono drum kit track so that the lower frequencies of the kick and the higher frequencies from the cymbals and snare are reduced, maybe add a little stereo reverb to it and that could be the track for your toms.  Do the same thing with other clones you've made of the drum kit track to try and isolate the EQ for the snare and cymbals, and mix them accordingly.  You can get more flexibility in mixing your one mono full drum kit track this way.

 

*  If you had a second mic, you could then maybe record the drum kit at least a bit in stereo, and with track clones mixed and played back in mono and separated EQ-wise like described above, you might even be able to get some separation between toms left and right and cymbals left and right, and be better able to first isolate and process before re-blending the different sounds coming from the kit.

I do have a DAW, what we did originally was just record the drum beat separately on its own (We didn't use met because our drummer had to leave rehearsal early) and once we had a nice enough drum track we just recorded the guitars over it. (Honestly I thought the guitar and bass lines were sloppy takes, but I got out voted to redo them for just the demo XD) Vocals had to wait because our vocalists voice was acting up a tad. So I'll probably end up doing what you said and mix them separately. Additionally Ive been doing research in the digital drum department as well. Found some program called Addictive Drums, looks interesting.

 

As for separate mics, what mic would you suggest? A condenser mic or an acoustic mic? That way I know exactly what would be best to pick up.

 

Thanks for all the help,

 

Zack

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  • 1 year later...

Digital drums can work well, but if the song requires more than something simple, it might be worth it to go with a live drum.  One song I did with digital drums took FOREVER to do because I had a certain sound in mind, and there were spots in the song where all the sounds had to be cut and pasted, and hand put in with a keyboard to follow the ebb and flow of the music, and I ended up paying somebody else to do it anyway because I didn't have the expertise to make it work well.  In the end it probably would have cost less but sounded just as good to just pay a drummer to put a great track to it.  Something to think about- especially since you have a band, it may be worth the investment when the time comes to get the mics for the drum set :) 

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