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! 

Recording the Drums- Setting Up the Mics

After successfully tuning my drum set, the next step was to set up the mics so that  they could pick up that sweet sounds that my drums were making. First of all, I needed to make sure I had all the right equipment. Luckily, I had previously gotten hold of a "CAD Pro 7" Mics from some rando off craigslist, as well as mic stands from a sale at Guitar Center. The only thing stopping me from recording myself before was that fact that I had no idea what to do; but thanks to "Recording Drums: the Complete Guide", I believe its finally time to set these mics up.

After reading the book I now understand that there are specific mics from specific parts of the instrument. Snare mics, Tom mics, and Bass drum mics all seemed extremely self explanatory; but there was one type that I didn't understand until now: overhead mics. Overheads mics are meant to basically capture the sounds of the cymbals in your set and are much more sensitive than any other mic. Major(the books author)  describes them as "the unifying element in any drum sound"(Major 22). He goes on to say "Don’t think of them as cymbal mics, but more as 'everything' mics. If placed correctly, the overheads will capture the entire drum kit, in phase and with the same basic frequency balance and tone."(Major 23). This made me think because before he was just saying that they were made for cymbals but now he is adding that you can record the rest of the kit with them too. I searched the internet for thoughts on the concept and apparently depending on the kind of sound you are looking for, the overheads can be set up for just the cymbals or the full drum kit. I decided that since I have mics already made for the toms and snares and such that I want my overheads to focus more precisely on the cymbals. I went back to the book to find Major's best configuration for my set up. At first I was going to use a mic setup called xy but that looked hella stupid and since my drum set has to look as dope as possible, I went for the second best called "Up Down" position.

Measuring to make sure the Overhead mics are even

 

I thought I was done after setting my overheads to look like this, but Major says that for it to not mess up the recordings, the mics have to be set symmetrical from a set point of the kit, which means that they have to be the same distance apart from a place that I choose the be the center of the sound in my recordings. For the center of my sound I chose my snare drum because I want it to be centered in the middle of my recordings and have the toms and cymbals placed off the to left and right. I then measured the distance from each overhead to the snare to make sure they were equal. Setting up the rest of the mics was super easy because I'm super smart. Major said that a lot of adjustment will be made after you here the recording of the instruments played back so I guess ill have to wait until I get my mics hooked up to the computer some how. 

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! 

Recording the Drums - Tuning

When deciding what kind of book I should read for this project, I had trouble deciding on what new thing I should learn because I'm pretty much filthy at everything already.  I came to the conclusion that instead of learning something new, I should build on something I am already dope at. Once I realized this, it became clear what I should do. Since I've been drumming for so long, I think its time I learned how to get my drumming into recordings. That way I could give you all the gift of my tasty drum fills straight from my drumset to your earholes.

The book I choose to help me understand the subject of creating a home recording studio, was "Recording Drums: the Complete Guide" by Mike Major. The First thing the book tells me I should do before even getting the recording equipment out, is make sure my drums tuning's are top notch. Before reading this book I thought I had knew about everything needed to tune a drum and make it sound good, But apparently it is way more complicated than just tuning diagonally  across the head and  making sure everything is in the right pitch. My guy Mike Major  says that tuning a live set is very different than the what is needed to make a audio recording sound "phat"(his words not mine). To make you're toms sound good in a recording, they should be tuned to slightly match notes on a scale, " You can mix and match intervals. I find that you need a wider interval between the lower toms but you can get away with a closer interval between higher toms. for example on a kit ranging in 5 toms ( 8-10-12-14-16) [inches] try a tuning that goes (from bottom up) C-F-Bb-Eb-G." (Major 10)  By tuning the toms to these intervals it helps give them a good sound distinction between them without them sounding too dissonant when hit together or ringing out. after you get the basic tuning of the notes for each head, you've got to fine tune them to make them sound sexy.

"To start, multiply the frequency of the desired fundamental note by 1.75 and tune both top and bottom lug-pitches to that frequency. Then, measure the fundamental pitch of the drum and adjust the pitch of top and bottom heads accordingly"

After hours of fine tuning i have finally come to a sound that I believe gives that "phat" feeling Major was referring to. Of course because I am not using any recording equipment yet, it will sound really crappy when just heard through the microphone of an iphone so chill.

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!