anyone wanna check out some short RAW drum tracks?

[cobrahead1030]

http://disvisioned.net/clips/drums

working on recording drums again...using our new firepod, and would like some opinons on the sound of things if anyone has time to take a listen; forgive my sloppy excuse for drumming, i'm a guitar player tho

btw, this is a gretsch catalina kit being recorded with a presonus firepod...d6 on the kick, 604's on toms 1,2 and 4, audix i5 on tom 3, sm57 on the snare, mxl 603s overheads

looking for general opinions, anything you guys my hear wrong, suggestions, or whatever...if anyone felt like doing a quick mix on these, i'd be glad to check it out

 

[joeymusicguy]

your kick needs a little more dampening, its got that tube hollow sound in there.

 

[cobrahead1030]

thanks, i'll mess around with that later today

we're using a ported backhead, with a felt strip across the inside to kill the resonance from it...all i've got inside the drum itself is a t shirt lying in the bottom, which helped with a lot of that hollow 'pingy' tone

maybe i should try a towel, or small pillow in there to do a little more of what the t shirt does?

 

[~BURNY~]

Kick: Something nasty on the attack. A bit cartoonish.
Snare: Terrible. No punch. Change something. Could be the mic, the snare... or the drummer goggly: ). The bleeding from the crashes may cause some problems.
OH: Fair but over exagerated hi-frequencies.
Toms: Need dampening (most likely on the resonant heads).
Hope it helps.

 

[MKS]

Perhaps take off the front head on the kick.

The snare needs some life or crack to it.

Considering the tracks are raw, I thought it sounded like a good start.

 

[nwright]

I'm listening at work through crappy PC speakers, but I think the bass drum isn't too bad, but the toms sound pretty good on my end. The worst to me is the snare. Not too bad, but needs some high crack.

Are you going to be gogging the drums, therefore the reason you have them broken into sample tracks? I'd be interested to hear the whole mix as is right now...That'd give me little better idea, personally.

Are you grouping toms into the Firepod? I recorded our EP with our drummer going into all the inputs on the Firepod and tracking him completely by himself, no scratch tracks a la Andols from Chimaira style...Worked perfect for us and I didn't have to group any of the toms or pieces of the kit.

Sounds like you have an exellent start to me. I wished our drums sounded that good on our EP raw. Being a noob sucks!

 

[Glenn Fricker]

The snare certainly needs some work... Try a tighter strainer, and evans muting ring, and a lower tuning. Grab a marker & a quarter, use them to draw a circle in the exact center of the drum & make sure the drummer hits there & only there. Perhaps move the mic, higher, closer & angled down more. That, & tell the drummer to quit bitching.

I'm gonna hazard a guess that the Firepod doesn't have adjustable imedance... Checking the specs, it's running 1.3kOhms on the input. The 57 needs 300 Ohms. The 57 is extremely sensitive to loading, so you've got two options: Consult the July 2006 issue of recording & learn how to build a "gizmo" to lower the preamp's impedance on the 57. The other solution would be to try an i5 on the snare. It's sensitive to loading, but not nearly as much as the 57 is. Not to mention, it can sound pretty wicked on the snare.


BTW, what kind of head do you have on the kick?

-0z-

 

[ApolloSpeed]

get one of those aquarian kick heads that have the muting ring pre-attached to it.....and then tune that bitch pretty low.

 

[cobrahead1030]

thanks for the responses so far

that snare head is about a month old, but we do have an identical snare we just bought a brand new head for, so i'll try that...we also have a muting ring on the snare, without it the snare has a nice helping of that god awful st. anger PING

we also have an extra i5 lying around, so i'll try that as well

i'm not sure about the head on the kick drum

i'm only using the 8 mics for each of the firepod's inputs, i only grouped the toms together like that as left and right tracks to save space

i don't want to use samples for anything, i broke them down like this so that you guys could hear exactly what each track has going on...by the way, if you import all the tracks into any recording software starting at the same time, they are synched up so you can hear it all together (which i'm sure most of you know...but i didn't point it out initially)

does it sound like i'm getting an awful lot of unwanted crap bleeding into the snare or tom mics? i tried my best to avoid that, but this is only my 3rd attempt @ tracking drums so i really don't know how much/little to reasonably expect

thanks again everyone

 

[nwright]

Seeing how we both are/were new to the Firepod, I still think it sounds good and think you are on the right track. Seems like the problems are more related to the drums themselves rather than your production/engineering approach, so I think that's good. I felt like I had a lot of bleed into the snare mic as well, but when I looked at the waveforms in Cubase, the snare hits peaked much higher than the bleeding signals, even though it seemed like there was a lot to my ear. I used a gate and it cleaned it right up. I did this to the toms as well to great effect. you could also mute the dead spots on the toms and hihg pass the OH's and you'd be ready to focus on the intrument (drums) themselves.

 

[cobrahead1030]

cool man, thanks for the tips

we got the drums to sound pretty good in the room, i followed a lot of oz's advice in his thread, which has helped us IMMENSELY but some of it didn't work out for us
kick drum with no back head sounded really weak to me

we bought a tension watch that we spent about two weeks with, and honestly had better luck tuning by ear...tho i'd like to try it again sometime

we're also using spaced overheads, we tried the xy setup and it just didn't catch the whole kit well for us

i love the d6 and 604 mics tho...we're currently borrowing them, but i definitely see these mics being purchased ASAP

 

[joeymusicguy]

ever tried a e609 for the highest tom? its amazing

it just takes quit a bit of time to get it angled right, the direction on that mic is SUPER sensitive to drums.

 

[joeymusicguy]

oh, and andy does that with the 609, i believe?

 

[MKS]

Consult the July 2006 issue of recording & learn how to build a "gizmo" to lower the preamp's impedance on the 57.
-0z-

What page is that on?

 

[cobrahead1030]

ever tried a e609 for the highest tom? its amazing

our highest tom on this kit is a 6"

and as-is our drummer has enough time not hitting that tiny 604 on it, so i wouldn't see the 609 lasting more than half an hour there before it was in pieces

about the impdedance thing with the 57, a good friend of mine who also posts here from time to time has a device like what you're talking about oz....not much chance i'll have it for this session, but i'm certainly gonna check that out next time i visit him

if i were to do test clips with/without it on say the snare, what kinda difference should i expect?

 

[Glenn Fricker]

What page is that on?

My bad. It's actually the May 2006 issue. Page 75. I'm going to see if I can whip up a few of these to try on my Vintech & Ward Beck preamps. I'll keep you posted.


-0z-

 

[joeymusicguy]

My bad. It's actually the May 2006 issue. Page 75. I'm going to see if I can whip up a few of these to try on my Vintech & Ward Beck preamps. I'll keep you posted.


-0z-

i have about every mix magazine there is, but not recording =(

gonna go look some more

 

[joeymusicguy]

www.jensen-transformers.com/an/an005.pdf

im so confused, so you dont want to match impedance? BLAG i was hoping this was my answer to my crappy sounding snare tracks

 

[MKS]

My bad. It's actually the May 2006 issue. Page 75. I'm going to see if I can whip up a few of these to try on my Vintech & Ward Beck preamps. I'll keep you posted.


-0z-

Thanks man. I thought I was retarded. I looked and looked and couldn't find shit.

 

[Glenn Fricker]

www.jensen-transformers.com/an/an005.pdf

im so confused, so you dont want to match impedance? BLAG i was hoping this was my answer to my crappy sounding snare tracks

The solution is much simpler than this. I'm merely a case of building a custom cable with a resistor soldered in paralell with pins 2&3. There's a mathematical formula for determining the resistor value, by working the desired impedance against the peamp's impedance. I got myself a whole whack of resistors today & I'm gonna solder up a couple of test units tomorrow. I'll keep ya posted.

-0z-