Acoustic Drums for Metal: A Guide
- Thread starter Glenn Fricker
- Start date
Fredrik-Ablaze
Member
martyfireball
myspace.com/studioferox
Brett - K A L I S I A
Dreaded Moderator
Fredrik-Ablaze said:
Mine : get rid of its bleeding in the snare mic through phase inversion (edit : or gate side-chaining)
I often crank the hihat mic in the drummer's overheads so he won't hit it as heavily, eliminating some of the bleed into the snare mic. I do, however, record it and use it in the mix, often actually as a brightener for the snare.
Pics are up for part 3.... sorry for the delay.
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/showpost.php?p=4264367&postcount=42
-0z-
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/showpost.php?p=4264367&postcount=42
-0z-
moose209
Bottom chugger
Thanks for all the hard work you've been putting into this thread - it's great to see a community with enthusiasm to help eachother- alot of the scenes in england don't even mix let alone help eachother. Keep it up my friend we really appreciate it.
Nitronium Blood
UM BOARDS' JESTER
Awesome man... this information will aid me in my masterplan to one day have my own recording place.OzNimbus said:
kaomao
Member
deathtotaliban
Member
pretty good stuff. yea i didnt totally agree with telling a drummer how to set up either but when u clarified it now i get what you meant. and drummers usualy are really thickheaded. I recorded this kid who owned the worst drum set ever...percussion plus and he would not use mine...an older (better than the new ones) yamaha stage custom with new evans heads and completely tuned so its basically his fault that their tracks sound like crap bc of him. not only drummers but anyone who thinks they own at their instrument usually isnt in to getting helpful advise. good info keep itcoming
jordan
jordan
3.5 PHASE ISSUES & SEPARATION
Hey gang, before I move on to part 4, I figured I'd help out some of the noobs here with some examples of what good separation & phase is really all about.
The sound samples are played by my good friend & monster drummer, Jeff Lelaucher from the rap metal group, CENTRAL SLANG. Ok, rap metal isn't exactly my favourite type of music, but these guys play great & are always fabulous to work with.... that, & I have Jeff play session drums on my own material. He's what I call the quintessential studio drummer.
Here's a pic of Jeff on his kit a few years ago, sorry but I don't have anything recent. As you can see, I've got carpet down
on the floor, but these examples we're listening to are with the plywood platform.
The kit itself is handmade here in Windsor by the Glenn Burger Drum company.
It's a 9 piece maple, and is one of my favourite kits to record. If anyone is interested in acquiring a very high quailty handmade kit, for Canadian prices (I.E. totally reasonable) I can put you in touch with Mr. Burger. He's a great guy to deal with, and happens to be in the illustrious three which I mentioned earlier. Let's put it this way, if I ever decide to replace my DW's, I'm getting Glenn to build my kit. His stuff is just plain fantastic. BTW, the snare for this track is a 14" Plexiglass Pork Pie snare Jeff picked up for $200. I still can't belive it sounded that good. Jeff's "other" snare is one of those DW EDGE snares: The Neil Peart model. 2/3rds brass, 1/3 wood, wieghs a fucking ton, and retails for about 2 grand Canadian. I'll have some clips of it in later articles.
Ok, so on with the show... The examples I'm posting are very, very simple, to illustrate my points. I'll post some more complex examples in future articles.
Now, about that goddamn hi-hat bleed. If you take a look at the picture above, you'll see Jeff has massive amounts of physical separation between the hats & the snare. Not only horizontally, but vertically as well. What does this mean? Very little hat bleed into the snare... that, & he hits the snare like his sticks were slegehammers. Meaning less gain on the snare mic, and less hi-hat bleeding into it. A good rule of thumb: Tell your drummer to hit the snare hard, & be soft on the hats. Unfotunately, alot of these meatheads have it backwards.
Here's a raw snare track example: No compression,EQ, or gate.
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Raw%20Snare.mp3
Notice how little the hats bleed, even when he starts hitting them hard.
Now, here's the overhead track from the same part. Again, completely raw.
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Overheads.mp3
As you can hear, this is where the 'air on the snare' is.... that & most of the cymbal sound. If we combine the two, we should get a rockin' snare happening.
Here's the two together:
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Combined%20%20out%20of%20phase.mp3
Well, that doesn't sound right... what the hell happened to the snare? Simple answer: It's out of phase. The mics are working against each other, and cancelling each other out. Here's a pic of the phenomenon.
You'll notice the snare waveform falls below the midpoint line just as the overhead mics are rising.... hence the cancellation. We're getting a very thin & shitty snare sound right now, and belive me, we don't want this. So, what do we do? There's two choices: We can flip the phase button on the channel strip, (green button in the upper right of the screenshot) which is really the only choice engineers had in the analog days, or we can time align.
Here's a pic of what an original snare strike looks like. Since sound takes time to travel, the strike is arriving at the snare mic much sooner that at the overheads.
Time alignment simply means moving the snare track over slightly, so it's in perfect lock-step with the overhead mics.
Now the sounds of both mics are rising & falling at the same intial strike. I don't always do this for every project. It really depends on what sounds better. Some drum tracks sound great with just the phase switch flipped, some sound better time aligned. The key here is experimentation.
Here's what a time aligned & in phase snare sounds like:
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Combined%20in%20phase.mp3
And, after a little compression, EQ, and some verb on the kit.. as well as adding in the kick drum. Sorry, but no speed metal click kick on this one, it's pretty much a straight ahead rap song. I have the snare mic fader pretty far down on this mix, but if I wanted a quieter hat, I could drop the overheads a touch & bring up the close mic... the separation gives me that option. However, I do like the sound I have right now.
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Full%20Drums.mp3
And, finally, here's how the drums sit in the mix:
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Full%20Mix.mp3
Hopefully this was some help for those of you who don't know what your phase button is for. You can use time alignment on your kick & tom tracks as well. Remember, the key is to experiment between phase flipping & time alignment. Sometimes, the drums really benefit from having a slight delay between the close mic & the overheads. It really depends on the song & the drummer.
BTW, merry Christmas to everyone.
-0z-
Hey gang, before I move on to part 4, I figured I'd help out some of the noobs here with some examples of what good separation & phase is really all about.
The sound samples are played by my good friend & monster drummer, Jeff Lelaucher from the rap metal group, CENTRAL SLANG. Ok, rap metal isn't exactly my favourite type of music, but these guys play great & are always fabulous to work with.... that, & I have Jeff play session drums on my own material. He's what I call the quintessential studio drummer.
Here's a pic of Jeff on his kit a few years ago, sorry but I don't have anything recent. As you can see, I've got carpet down
on the floor, but these examples we're listening to are with the plywood platform.
The kit itself is handmade here in Windsor by the Glenn Burger Drum company.
It's a 9 piece maple, and is one of my favourite kits to record. If anyone is interested in acquiring a very high quailty handmade kit, for Canadian prices (I.E. totally reasonable) I can put you in touch with Mr. Burger. He's a great guy to deal with, and happens to be in the illustrious three which I mentioned earlier. Let's put it this way, if I ever decide to replace my DW's, I'm getting Glenn to build my kit. His stuff is just plain fantastic. BTW, the snare for this track is a 14" Plexiglass Pork Pie snare Jeff picked up for $200. I still can't belive it sounded that good. Jeff's "other" snare is one of those DW EDGE snares: The Neil Peart model. 2/3rds brass, 1/3 wood, wieghs a fucking ton, and retails for about 2 grand Canadian. I'll have some clips of it in later articles.
Ok, so on with the show... The examples I'm posting are very, very simple, to illustrate my points. I'll post some more complex examples in future articles.
Now, about that goddamn hi-hat bleed. If you take a look at the picture above, you'll see Jeff has massive amounts of physical separation between the hats & the snare. Not only horizontally, but vertically as well. What does this mean? Very little hat bleed into the snare... that, & he hits the snare like his sticks were slegehammers. Meaning less gain on the snare mic, and less hi-hat bleeding into it. A good rule of thumb: Tell your drummer to hit the snare hard, & be soft on the hats. Unfotunately, alot of these meatheads have it backwards.
Here's a raw snare track example: No compression,EQ, or gate.
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Raw%20Snare.mp3
Notice how little the hats bleed, even when he starts hitting them hard.
Now, here's the overhead track from the same part. Again, completely raw.
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Overheads.mp3
As you can hear, this is where the 'air on the snare' is.... that & most of the cymbal sound. If we combine the two, we should get a rockin' snare happening.
Here's the two together:
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Combined%20%20out%20of%20phase.mp3
Well, that doesn't sound right... what the hell happened to the snare? Simple answer: It's out of phase. The mics are working against each other, and cancelling each other out. Here's a pic of the phenomenon.
You'll notice the snare waveform falls below the midpoint line just as the overhead mics are rising.... hence the cancellation. We're getting a very thin & shitty snare sound right now, and belive me, we don't want this. So, what do we do? There's two choices: We can flip the phase button on the channel strip, (green button in the upper right of the screenshot) which is really the only choice engineers had in the analog days, or we can time align.
Here's a pic of what an original snare strike looks like. Since sound takes time to travel, the strike is arriving at the snare mic much sooner that at the overheads.
Time alignment simply means moving the snare track over slightly, so it's in perfect lock-step with the overhead mics.
Now the sounds of both mics are rising & falling at the same intial strike. I don't always do this for every project. It really depends on what sounds better. Some drum tracks sound great with just the phase switch flipped, some sound better time aligned. The key here is experimentation.
Here's what a time aligned & in phase snare sounds like:
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Combined%20in%20phase.mp3
And, after a little compression, EQ, and some verb on the kit.. as well as adding in the kick drum. Sorry, but no speed metal click kick on this one, it's pretty much a straight ahead rap song. I have the snare mic fader pretty far down on this mix, but if I wanted a quieter hat, I could drop the overheads a touch & bring up the close mic... the separation gives me that option. However, I do like the sound I have right now.
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Full%20Drums.mp3
And, finally, here's how the drums sit in the mix:
http://www.spectresound.ca/drum%20article/Full%20Mix.mp3
Hopefully this was some help for those of you who don't know what your phase button is for. You can use time alignment on your kick & tom tracks as well. Remember, the key is to experiment between phase flipping & time alignment. Sometimes, the drums really benefit from having a slight delay between the close mic & the overheads. It really depends on the song & the drummer.
BTW, merry Christmas to everyone.
-0z-
Genius Gone Insane
http://www.¯\(°_o)/¯.com
You should publish this and sell it. I've paid $ for a lot of reading material that's longer and less informative than yours. This is dummied down perfectly--Awesome.
Well, one thing I've learned over the years is how to teach. Not by choice, mind you, but necessity.
Thanks for the compliment, btw... now you've really got me thinking.... hmmm.
Thanks for the compliment, btw... now you've really got me thinking.... hmmm.
