drum sample
so we are having a lot of problems with getting good drum sound when recording. especially the kick drum. i have a quick sample of me playing (not very well) on the set for you to listen to and critque. if you could give any tips, they would be very appreciated. thanks
kevin
I listened to it a while ago and since no one has responded I’ll shoot first. It’s not too bad. I think the bassdrum is entirely livable, the toms sounded a little dead however and either the snare was kinda dead or pretty heavily gated. But I personally like hearing a lot of dynamics and would rather risk noise than miss a ghost note.
With my limited experience I say go and record some stuff trying to get a clear sound (which it seems you are doing), then fool around with some reverb and the likes afterwards. You are going to have to see how it sounds along with other instruments. Try doing a song you want to record and see what you think is lacking or what you want change then post it and people could give some more detailed advice on getting the sound you are shooting for.
Okay, this is the total cop out way (though very effective), but try replacement. Get PeakFreak from Tobybear and then you can trigger samples of a kick drum. Just an idea.
But the two things you can do for that kick is tune it and move the mic. However, have you listened to it in a mix? It might work fine once it is sitting with the bass etc.
Not a bad drum sound - what type of music will you be recording?
Being a drummer, I personally mic the bassdrum (Shure SM57) with absolutely no muffling in it - a reasonably good bassdrum with good heads tuned properly (loose skins for that ‘click’ sound) sounds like a massive cannon going off - if you like that live kind of penetrating sound.
Also, EQ, EQ, EQ! Especially for pop/rock bassdrum sounds. Great live bassdrums sounds at a gig are EQ’d to the sound of your preference. I assume the bassdrum is being recorded on it’s own track? If not, it needs to be so you can control the EQ on the bassdrum only.
Good luck, have fun!!
Dan
ok so we changed some stuff around and now we have a better sounding kit, at least the bass drum is a little better anyway. we also took some pictures so that you can see how we are micing the drums. we have 5 mics in all, the second bass drum is not being miced right now because we dont need it at the moment. those mics all run into a behringer mixer which has a “tape-out” that runs to the back of my computer. thats how we are recording in a nutshell. we think our sound is pretty decent at this point, our style is hard rock with occasional pop influences, so we are shooting for that type of drum sound. any advice tips or critiques on our sound would be very much appreciated, and thanks for waiting for me to post again.
here is a sound clip of how the drum set sounds now:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hemphrey/drum2.mp3
and here are the pics of the setup:
Very clean tight drum sound - Nice cymbal sound also. Yes, the bass drum does sound better IMHO.
This is TOTALLY 100% personal preference, but have you tried removing some muffling from the bassdrum? Again, preference only, your drum sound is clear and tight.
Love the pics, nice kit!
Dan
dlachance@polarbear.com
yeah originally we had almost no muffling in there and we got this really sweet booming bass right, which i love but in the end, we couldnt get the beat sound at all, so we had to give up the bass to get the beater sound. we tried sweeping the freqencies on the mixer to see if we could find the beater frequency and pull it up so that we could have the booming bass and beater sound but we couldnt find it. so unfortunatly we went this route.