aa - week 10 - recording of the drums

WHINE WHINE WHINE : I've just spent an hour and a half trying to upload files. 672kb worth. Problems with authentication. Whenever a sample is in the process of travelling, I have to reauthenticate with my student id/password, then firefox freezes, then I have to use the task manager to kill the process - etc. Internet Explorer wouldn't even get that far....
Hence now that I'm going to write my blog, I'm grumpy and have much less time so it may be a bit short and sparse (apart from the whine that is ).
Also have noticed that some sounds missed normalising, and the loops aren't really that loopy (blame it on ProTools).
I'll attempt to neaten it all up over the next couple of days when time is once again leisurely.

WARNING : all the mp3's are on one external page, it's the best I could manage :)
http://www.box.net/shared/26k4tv49f4

This weeks' task was to record a drum kit[1].
Went for a minimal microphone setup. 6 microphones.

Shure 52A Beta on the kick, 56A Beta on the snare. Two Neumann Km-84's as overheads (spaced about 3' apart pointing down at roughly the snare and floor tom). Two Nemann U87's set up about 12' in front using MS stereo technique.
I had fun mixing these down. Eq on all mics except the MS stereo. Listening back, even the close mic has a pleasing amount of space. I quite enjoy the bigger looser sounds, lo-fi. Although I might have gone a bit overboard on "s dm 2 no sd.mp3", at least in regard to adding other sounds.

e dm 1.mp3
A mixture of all mics, just a little spacious. No compression.

s dm 1 no room.mp3
The "close" mics, shows a bit of space t from the overheads. Compression, perhaps a bit much.

s dm 2 no sd.mp3
Same loop as above. No snare mic, lots of room, quite a wide sound. Compression.

s dm 3 no sd.mp3
No snare mic, quite similar to above. Compression.
s dm 4 no comp.mp3
Mix of all mics, no compression. The crash has a really nice stereo decay. The toms sound a little thin but not unpleasant, perhaps a little out of context compare to the big sound of the rest of the kit.

snare above.mp3 snare below.mp3 :
Here the mic is alternatively positioned above and below the snare. Below has bugger all decay, the samples features one snare hit followed by 2 kicks, demonstrates how the snare will buzz to other sounds.
Above also shows the spill from the hi hats.

The kick drum mic was placed just inside the hole, did try the mic outside for 1 take. When i neaten this up I'll add an example of the two kick sounds.
The one outside was much brighter/thinner, I preferred the inner sound and moved it back in.


[1] Fieldhouse, Steve. Drum kit recording technique. University of Adelaide, 15 May 2007.