JohnnyBold

BTW, compression reduces dynamic range. It will never increase dynamic range, percieved or not. Expanders and gates take up that job.

Yes, using compression properly will make a drum sound pop. But if you use it to balance a kit, your settings are more about correcting something rather than creating something.

Oh yeah..... A good test to see if a drummer is balanced, is to record a live gig with a single mic at 25 ft away from the band. If only vocals are going through the PA, The band should balance themselves accordingly. If all you hear from the drummer is ....CACK........CACK......CACK, staying off the rimshot as a backbeat may be a good idea. And having the guitars and keys turn down would be cool too. But most bands will opt to put the kik through the PA, to make up for the lack of balance. Then tom fills are lost...........and so it goes.......

Hi Chris, Thanks for reading my post. I do agree with you that kit balance is the drummers' job. And I do understand you defending a skill you've taken many years to perfect. The problem, from a recording point of view, is the nature of the huge transient that a snare rimshot creates. If you look at the wave of a center hit snare and a rimshoot, you'll see that the transient on a rimshot is way above that of the center hit. So an engineer will try to compress the rimshot to find tone. Now add that signal to the over head mics and now the tone keeps changing because the rimshot has a different dynamic range than the overheads. So the engineer tries compressing a buss mix of the drums and now the cymbles start ducking when the rimshot is hit. Then there's the problem of room sound mics picking up an unbalanced reverb. It will sound as if only the rimshoot has room sound. The Idea that the rimshot adds tone by resonating the shell is true from a drummers point of view. Human ears however, tend to down play transients. Good mics and digital recording do not. Can this be fixed with limiters and other audio engineer tricks? Yes. But why not get it right, forget the tricks and hit the center of the head?

--------DRUMMERS II (the sequel)--------- OK, so whilst I'm addressing the drumming community, I may as well add my other drumming concern.... "Dribble Foot". Dribble foot is my term for unintended kick drum rumble. This usually occurs from the following: When a drummer plays the kick drum and lets the beater rest against the head, thus the beater rides the rest of the drum resonance and bounces against the head, or when a drummer leaves the beater on the head and keeps time or subdivisions of time lightly with their foot. The resulting low end rumble causes a lack of clarity in the bass region. This lack of clarity will most likely end up in a reduction of low end in a live mix as the live sound engineer franticly tries to "clean up the mud". Alternatively In the recording studio, the bill gets higher as the savvy audio engineer tries to clean the mud by editing out the offending dribbles. And this is a LOT of editing! So as a concerned "music citizen" I offer this advise: When playing a kick drum....."Hit it and Quit it"...... No, not the groupies, the kick drum. he he

-----DRUMMERS-------- I do hate to be the harbinger of bad news, but........A good drum kit is made in such a way that all the drums are of similar volume. Woods are used and/or combined to create consistant tone and volume. So consistancy is a good thing. Imagine a guitar having an "A" string that is overwhelmingly loud, that guitar would be on the repair bench in a heartbeat. Then why, oh why do some drummers develop a techinique of constenty using rimshots on a snare. This technique throws the drum kit out of balance. A rim shot is striking the skin and the rim of the drum at the same time. This produces a loud sound and is great for coloring up a fill or accenting a hit. But the constant use of rimshots creates problems in recording and to a lessor extent in live sound. In recording, mics are used to capture the sound of the kit from above, these are known as "overheads" and mics can also be placed further out in the room, these are known as room mics. When a snare is too loud, these mics need to be turned down or compressed to achieve a balanced drumsound. The result is a drum sound that has too little cymbles from the overheads or ,with compression, a drum sound with a super squished snare with no snap. In addition to this problem, rimshots in my opinion sound thin, piercing and don't sit well in a mix. Now, I realize that the "constant rimshot" technique was most likely developed in rock music as a way to get heard above loud guitar amplifiers during rehearsals. The solution to loud guitar amps during rehearsals is to raise the speaker cabinets to ear height and place them next to the guitarist. Soon you'll discover you have decent rehearsal levels. Sorry if I'm being harsh, but I thought you may want to know.