Ok guys, this is the first time I dare to post something here, as this is my first "real" production. I'm mixing the pre-production demos for the upcoming album of my band Poema Arcanvs. I need some feedback ... the drums are 100% acoustic (no sound replacement at all). I'm the only guitar player in the band, so the bass is kind of a second guitar. It was all done through my Fireface 800, on Cubase SX3. I don't have proper monitors yet (I use my crappy Sony stereo for monitoring). Any comments are welcome. There are 3 songs to listen to:
http://www.soundclick.com/jumungus
Cheers!
*EDIT*
I'm adding pics of the drum recording session. The home studio is a some friend's one, I just brought my fireface, FMR stuff and some other things we borrowed. The mics were:
Snare: 2 57s, one in front of the snare, the other at the side. We tracked both, but eventually only used the front one, as it sounded better and had the same amount of HH bleed (we used 2 so we could compare which had less HH bleed).
Bass drum: e 602 at the hole of the resonant head, just a few cms inside the drum, pointing at the center of the skin.
Toms and floor tom: e604
OH: 2 AKG 414. To place them I used a string attached to the center of the snare and tom#2 skins to make sure that the OH's were at the same distance from those 2, so they were centered and in phase. Seems like that technique worked fine. most of the brightness of the toms and snare come from the OH's, not from the close mikes.
HH: I guess it was some kind of oktava SDC mic ... I can't recall. I didn't think I was gonna use it, but at the end it helped to get the stereo imaging of the HH. I guess the fact that my drummer has a very controlled touch (not a hard cymbal slammer) helped too.
Ride: an AKG SDC .... cannot recall either ... they were just lying around in the studio ... it was placed beneath the ride, pointing at the bell.
we also used two shure KSMs of some sort on both extremes of the room as ambient mics. In the mix those are fairly sqashed with a SSL compressor, and focused on the mids (1 Khz -ish), so they gave some "air" and also helped to even out a lil' but the snare sound.
Ok guys, sorry for the long-assed post, I just wanted to share my experience. By the way, I used a lot of what Oz has taught us on his acoustic drums thread, so big thanks to him! Now the pics:
That's me on the control room .... there you can see my fireface, RNP, RNC, a digimax we borrowed and an ADA8000 from the studio (we had to use it because the digimax ADAT out was working strange, so at the end we used it only as a pre, through the analog inputs on the FF800). The console and monitors were from the studio... we used the console only for monitoring.
Drumkit close micing
drums
da ride
HH
the secret weapon to get that pumping low frequencies
two ugly fuckers and a drumkit
another angle
...and other
...more
My drummer and singer... in the background you can see one of the ambient mikes.
That's all ... as you can see, pretty much ghetto style recording. As soon as I find the bass - guitar recording pics I'll post them in here also. CHEERS!
http://www.soundclick.com/jumungus
Cheers!
*EDIT*
I'm adding pics of the drum recording session. The home studio is a some friend's one, I just brought my fireface, FMR stuff and some other things we borrowed. The mics were:
Snare: 2 57s, one in front of the snare, the other at the side. We tracked both, but eventually only used the front one, as it sounded better and had the same amount of HH bleed (we used 2 so we could compare which had less HH bleed).
Bass drum: e 602 at the hole of the resonant head, just a few cms inside the drum, pointing at the center of the skin.
Toms and floor tom: e604
OH: 2 AKG 414. To place them I used a string attached to the center of the snare and tom#2 skins to make sure that the OH's were at the same distance from those 2, so they were centered and in phase. Seems like that technique worked fine. most of the brightness of the toms and snare come from the OH's, not from the close mikes.
HH: I guess it was some kind of oktava SDC mic ... I can't recall. I didn't think I was gonna use it, but at the end it helped to get the stereo imaging of the HH. I guess the fact that my drummer has a very controlled touch (not a hard cymbal slammer) helped too.
Ride: an AKG SDC .... cannot recall either ... they were just lying around in the studio ... it was placed beneath the ride, pointing at the bell.
we also used two shure KSMs of some sort on both extremes of the room as ambient mics. In the mix those are fairly sqashed with a SSL compressor, and focused on the mids (1 Khz -ish), so they gave some "air" and also helped to even out a lil' but the snare sound.
Ok guys, sorry for the long-assed post, I just wanted to share my experience. By the way, I used a lot of what Oz has taught us on his acoustic drums thread, so big thanks to him! Now the pics:
That's me on the control room .... there you can see my fireface, RNP, RNC, a digimax we borrowed and an ADA8000 from the studio (we had to use it because the digimax ADAT out was working strange, so at the end we used it only as a pre, through the analog inputs on the FF800). The console and monitors were from the studio... we used the console only for monitoring.
Drumkit close micing
drums
da ride
HH
the secret weapon to get that pumping low frequencies
two ugly fuckers and a drumkit
another angle
...and other
...more
My drummer and singer... in the background you can see one of the ambient mikes.
That's all ... as you can see, pretty much ghetto style recording. As soon as I find the bass - guitar recording pics I'll post them in here also. CHEERS!
