Recording the Drums- The Interface and Digitizing

After I finished setting up the mics, the real challenge starts with trying to find that sweet spot in the sounds of all the drums. Though your drums might sound good when you hear them live, its a whole different ball game when recording them. There are a lot of issues you need to make sure you have under control, or else your drum kit will end up sounding like a wet fart in the recordings.

a closer look at the interface

Set up of the interface and drum kit 

One of the first issues, and probably one of the most important is clipping. Clipping is goes over a certain sound limit and thus the audio waves flatten off and you get a strange grainy noise. You have probably heard this sound if you have been blasting a sound trap with the bass all the way in your car and for some reason everything sounds distorted. Though sometimes clipping can be used as a tool to make your beats more personalized and can be added to music tastefully, but that should be left to when you messing with you audio tracks on the computer. When recording something you want to have no clipping at all so that you can get the cleanest sound possible, because while you can clip audio intentionally on the computer, you can also take off the effect. Clipping your base recroding mean that your stuck with that sound because that is what the mics have picked up, and if realized that the recording sounds like absolute trash with the clipping, you would have to go back and rerecord everything. Luckily, the interface I am using for transferring all the sounds the mics pic up to the computer has a feature that allows me to know when each mic is clipping. on the interface, you can turn the mic sensitivity up and down; having it to high will likely result in the sound clipping, but you don't want it too low either or else your mics wont pick up all the tones that the drums are producing. In order to get that sweet spot, Mike Major recommends in his book that you check each mic individually. To do this you must first turn the mic sensitivity all the way up, and then start smashing the drum you are fixing so that you can see that is clipping; then you keep hitting the drums as hard as you can and turn down the sensitivity until the clipping stops but just barely. This way all the drums are turned up as much as possible with out them clipping.

Next, you've got to make sure each drum is mic'd up to the way you like it. By using something called a monitor you can get hear what each drum sound like through the mics before having to record anything. The interface has a plug in for this and monitors can be any kind of multi driver speaker you'd like- from a studio pair of head phones, to nice full speakers. At this point its just about your preference so its up to the person to angle the mics in the way they want them to sound. For me, I like my tones to be a little more on the warm side- which means softer tones and less harsh sounds.

Now that I've gotten the mics set up perfectly in the way I want them, the next part is to get my computer set up for recording!

By the end of the book I'm hoping to do a drum cover of a popular song and post it, so if you want to you can comment any song I should do a drum cover for and hopefully i can do it!