some non-replaced metal drum issues...

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buhzie2

Guest
Hey, first time poster here... Had been looking around the forum for quite some time decided it was time to join! :headbang:


**Edit: Oops, think I might have posted this in the wrong sub-forum... sorry. Probably should have been under Production tips...***

Advance apology for the long post... sorry, I just want to be as detailed in my description as possible... :ill:


Anyway, I'm mixing drums for my good friend's band and I'm having some issues. The sound they are aiming for is similar to The Red Chord, Carnifex, etc - modern death/progressive metal.

I'm recording in a finished basement - wood floors, carpet under the drums, drop ceiling (about 7'6" high), and I've controlled most reflections around the room with Audimute acoustic blankets and some rockwool acoustic panels. Not the best sounding room, but it's fairly dry and free of reflections.

I'm doing my best to do without drum replacement. I really want to try my best to stay away from sampling the snare. The kick is the only thing I'm sampling, as I had tracked the drums with a mic and a trigger track and I like how it's sounding. I'm using samples of the actual kick from the kit.

I recorded with a spaced pair overheads (audix adx51's), a mono room mic (akg c2000b), beta 57 snare top, i5 bottom, 57 hi hat mic and akg c1000s ride, audix i5/d2/d4 on toms, and d6 on kick. I've done my best to get phasing between mics all aligned. My mic placements were all textbook and proper.

The snare and overheads are probably my biggest issues right now.
The problem comes in when I am working with the snare sound. I tuned these drums meticulously - a big pearl vinnie paul sig snare - medium-tight tension - sounds REAL fat and big. I have a pretty good amount of hi hat and other drum bleed in the top snare, even though I used a hypercardiod mic and positioned it as best as I could out of the pickup zone of the hi hat.

When I gate/expand the snare, I can get fairly pleasing results - not too choppy, but enough to tame the bleed and leave the sustain of the drum. Occasionally some hi hat and cymbals peek through when they're in unison with the snare, but there's nothing that can really be done about that.

When I compress the snare (quite highly, as I need the consistent dynamics for an unsampled snare), I get really unpleasant bleed coming through the gate. It pops through and the only way to get rid of it is to have such a fast closing gate that I lose all tone from the drum and am left with just the transient attack. Plus, using the Dominion transient shaping plugin, I tend to add so much attack that I lose all the body of the drum. Adding any more sustain brings out more bleed.

Also, when I go to add some sparkle and clarity to the snare and overheads (eq, harmonic enhancers, etc), it becomes a muddy mess. I'll side chain the snare to the overheads, but it compresses the overheads around the snare hits too much and leaves everything sounding muddy and undefined. I'll use a reference track just so I don't get lost within my own mix, but I can't get anywhere even close to the sparkle and shine of most recordings. Nothing fits together and it's frustrating the hell out of me!

I'm gonna do my best to get my best mix down uploaded to here soon, possibly tomorrow, so that it's easier to hear what I'm dealing with.

These modern, fat, huge drum sounds seem so unachievable. Something like the sound from The Contortionist () would be amazing... As far as I can tell, the snare seems almost 100% natural. I love this drum sound. I realize that my sound will be individual and replicating a sound is not realistic and not exactly desirable. But I like to base sounds off of something to begin with.

Any response would be amazing. I've read through many posts here and I feel like it would be great to get some customized feedback, and not just re-reading the sticky post of the drum recording guide...

Thanks!
 
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Basically this is the whole problem with not sample replacing drums. You need to compress hard, and sometimes eq pretty drastically aswell. And that really brings up the cymbal bleed. Basically if the drummer doesn't batter the crap out of his drums and lay off the cymbals you're completely fucked. Few drummers understand this concept.

Leave the harmonic exciters. As you've said they're just bringing you nothing but mud, so ditch them.

Mixing natural drums is pretty different to mixing a sampled kit, and everything is a bit of a compromise to be honest. Overheads are really important here. Alot of old school guys and rock mixers will start getting their kit sound using just the overheads and kick. If you can get this sounding good then once you add in spot mic's you should be in a pretty good place.

Try reducing the range on your gates so that when the gate is "closed" it's still letting through quite a bit of bleed. Your ears are better at hearing things move from signal to silence than hearing them move from signal to 'less signal'. So setting the gate more conservatively here can actually help tame the perception of bleed in the mix.

Chill out on the high frequency boosts on snares and toms, these just bring up bleed. You wont be able to get the same attack that you get from modern sample replaced drums.

Try letting more low end through in your overheads than you might normally do, and you don't necessarily have to kill the snare with a limiter either. These are practices that have developed through a desire to make the overheads become "cymbals only" mic's so that the whole kit can be triggered without the samples sounding too at odds with what's going on in the overheads.

Try high passing the overheads at somewhere around 200hz, listen for the body of the snare and make sure some of it is still coming through.
Don't limit the overheads. There's actually some attack to be gained by leaving the snare in here. After all these are often the only condensers on the kit, so you should get a nice quick transient from them.

Parallel compression on your spot mic's can help beef things up. But it's a bit trickier compared to doing it with sampled drums as again, it just brings up the bleed. I sometimes find rolling off the highs before the compressor can help here.

Don't know how much use your room mic will be if you've gone for a dead, reflection free sound in the room. Compressed really hard it can add a nice wash and some excitement in the mix. Normally I find myself rolling off everything above 4k and below 200 or so, and doing a little cut in the mids to stop it from sounding boxy. Smash it with an 1176 style plugin and see if it sounds good. If not then don't be afraid to ditch it.

I hope some of this helps. Really though if it's the modern super fat yet super attacky drum sound you're aiming for then you'll be ultimately disappointed. If that's the case then just go ahead and blend in some samples. At this stage in the game there's really no shame in it. Even the pro bands that have massive budgets and great studios are massively sample replacing their kits. And everyone on the low levels seems to be just going for programming drums in Slate/Superior these days anyway. Alot of the time not even bothering with real cymbals anymore.
 
My top three tips:

1) manually edit [strip silence] the toms. Don't rely on gates, they generally suck - and the fades you can draw in (either automation or actual fades) will be far superior.

2) don't be scared to get dirty with EQ and compression. all bets are off and rule book thrown away.

3) start with the cym's / kick / snare and bass. the relationship between these three will determine the low end space and where you can fit guitars and vox into. Since the kick will be super carved - you'll eat into the mid-snare frequencies, and the bass will sit under the kick. The cyms are there so you've got a reference for the whole kit and what space you've got left to 'fit' things in.

Good luck, and have fun with it. See point two - nothing is written in stone!
 
Slice and dice. Make sure you keep all the mics in phase though. Don't be afraid to cut anything out that sound shit - snare tracks, kick tracks, even ambient tracks... it's all open for rape.
 
Try this on the snare:

- Transient Designer (or simlar envelope shaper, like Digitalfishphones Domination and Flux Bitter Sweet) add Attack and reduce sustain, mix to taste
- Gate with sidechain filter, set attack to fastest possible (~1ms) and release so that the decay sounds decent
- subtractive EQ (only highpass filter, don't look at the numbers; sweep the frequency range and stop when you hear it getting thin, then get back ~20% (so if it's at 250hz, go back to ~200khz and if at 150hz go back to ~120hz). use only if needed and if you do, only cut, don't boost)
- Compressor (try around 4-8:1 ratio, 30-80ms attack time, release time that sounds good and threshold so that it compresses enough)
- shaping EQ (optional, name of the game is free for all)
- Soft clipper (like gvst Gclip or IK Multimedia Classic Clipper)
 
Try using expanders instead of gates, the bleed gets less obvious in my opinion; also transient designers are your friend.
I just did a metalcore band with 100% natural drums, as soon as they let me I can post clips :)
 
Thanks for all the awesome replies, guys. I'm definitely going to try out some of this stuff as soon as I can... I'll let you know how it goes
 
Argh, I wrote a whole thing and it got deleted. The gist of it was - it sounds like you're aiming for a sampled drum sound, but don't want to use samples for whatever reason. The album in your OP is definitely sampled. These are some non-sampled drum sounds

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAAXK3Mzm2k&feature=grec_index[/ame] (the kick volume is very inconsistent, the snare is probably sample augmented)
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGljvT_taMg&feature=grec_index[/ame] (kick gets buried quite a bit, snare is sample augmented)
(pretty sure everything here is natural, drum sounds often get buried)

These sounds are made in some of the best rooms in the world, with world-class drummers, top-of-the-line drums, cymbals, mics, and other studio equipment. If they still aren't "tight" enough, and still don't cut through enough for your tastes, then you simply won't achieve those sounds with natural drums, especially not in a home studio. If you want that punchy, tight sound, then sample replace. There's a reason 98% of metal (and now rock) albums sample replace/augment their drums.
 
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I'd also mention, just on the the mix overall... Have a listen to the Quiet place clip there, you'll notice the guitars is very sculpted to give the drums some space to breath and the bass is also treated the same way. If your mix is too thick and full, then natural drums are almost always going to sound somewhat buried. So remember to treat the entire mix in the sense of making sure everything gets space, find the fundamentals of the drum tones you recorded, make sure to bring those out, try to remove as much junk as possible and then work on getting the bass and guitars to fit in the spots that aren't going to clash with the drums :)
 
Cymbal bleed in the snare mic with girl handed drummers is the biggest issue I always have with natural drums man. It fucking sucks but if you are meticulous enough you can sample replace and end up with something that doesn't sound obviously fake. I always convert my drums to MIDI and tweak the MIDI velocities by hand to make sure it's interacting with my sample replacement plugin in a way that replicates the original performance's dynamics as much as possible, and I'm using samples of the drummer's kit a lot as well. Basically replacing SOLELY because of bleed, trying to end up with a sample track that sounds exactly like the natural snare but without bleed. Such a fucking bitch.
 
When dealing with snare bleed, I generally make a .gog of the natural snare itself *after taking about 5 - 6 samples of it beforehand* and use that blended in at about 40% to rid most of the bleed. It's not perfect, but it retains a more natural sound while still having the sample in there to help out! And trust me, you can definitely make that sound very good and very natural :)
 
You need to coach the drummer,
Hit skins hard and lay off the cymbals they don't need to be smashing them!

You could also trying tracking shells and cymbals separately
that way you have a natural drum sound with no bleed.
 
LoudNoises said:
You could also trying tracking shells and cymbals separately
that way you have a natural drum sound with no bleed.
Click to expand...

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdmPseD9hAo&ob=av2e[/ame] was done this way. Still not as tight as the OP mix. And it sounds stupid imo, it actually sounds like they've been tracked separately. Would not suggest this.
 
just giving the op ideas, hundreds of huge records have been tracked with shells first and cymbals afterwards but you need a real good drummer to pull it off.


was done this way. Still not as tight as the OP mix. And it sounds stupid imo, it actually sounds like they've been tracked separately. Would not suggest this.
Click to expand...

My only opinion on this is Shit Bands will always make Shit Records regardless of recording techniques, you can't polish a turd!
 
LoudNoises said:
You could also trying tracking shells and cymbals separately
that way you have a natural drum sound with no bleed.
Click to expand...

That's very tough! I would consider myself a good drummer, but I totally failed on this.

You need to coach the drummer,
Hit skins hard and lay off the cymbals they don't need to be smashing them!
Click to expand...

Cymbals sound better though, if you hit them hard. Also, this has to do a lot with limb independance, a drummer can't learn this in an instant on request in the studio.

I think the first step would be to set up the cymbals as distant from the toms as possible and then set up the microphones in a way, that the cymbals bleed into the dead zone.

Still, you'll always have to make compromises ;)
 
Songs for the Deaf by QOTSA was done this way, and I could be wrong, but I think Sacrament by Lamb of God was done like that too.
 
Yeah I'm pretty sure Lamb of God did at least their past 2 or 3 albums this way, but I think he did just the kicks, then just the snare/toms/cymbals......I may be incorrect though.
 
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