Drums and other stuff

Saturday was a very productive day in the C24 recording all sorts of things, but i had reserved the latter half of the day to record some drums in the NEVE.

And while the C24 session was productive, the Neve session was less than... With the student being 25 minutes late into my session, that was only the start of my problems that day. Turns out the snare stand and the hi hat stand were missing from the drum kit also. which just made the whole thing a lot harder, by the time we had found the snare stand (down in the audient) it was at least 1 hour into my recording time, and the hi hat stand was not found.

So finally with a kick and snare set up (still no hi hats) I started the recordings. Using the drum mic kit I clipped an sm57 to the top and the bottom of the snare, by inverting the phase on the Neve desk makes this super easy to record and get the sound right.

Using a technique I had learned off Adrian Carrol, I covered the kick mic and rear end of the kick in a thick blanket, using other mic stands to prop it up making a tunnel. This creates a large boomy kick drum sound.

I managed to record all the drum samples I needed for all 3 songs in this recording session however with no high hats, this was obviously due to not having a stand but turned out to not be too bad in the mix, because of the way I have mixed in the midi drums. The sounds turned out alright, but since i am not a drummer myself I was out of time and all around a bit sloppy. But I managed to isolate a good enough take that some tempo mapping could fix it.

The drums were then Eq'd and sent through a multi-band compresser for tone and then a compressor for side chaining. (below)

I also ran a parallel compression (using 3 compressors each set to incrementally higher ratio's the final being 30:1) This uses less cpu and also makes sure the compressor does it's job better.

I then balanced these two sets of drums together, giving the sound an almost realistic quality yet with the timing and consistency of a midi drum kit.

Using Logic X's Producer midi drum kits makes things much easier, with the ability to change things like stems of a real drum recording, this allows much more detailed customisation and mixing to your midi track.