In Summary

Roomy drum sounds are a great way to place kit sounds back a little, but pushing close mics up in the mix to get a balance can spoil the effect. Luckily there’s a way to infuse them with room character. See and hear for yourself one way to do it.

Going Deeper

Natural Sounds, Natural Solutions

Several styles can rely on more ambient drum sounds to paint a picture of the kit. Roomier flavours for jazz or folk are often used, but any genre can benefit a lot from the organic realism offered by sounds recorded with their own sense of space.

Of course the time-honoured way to get that sound is to record in the right space at the right distance with as few mics as possible. It’s been said that air is the best mixer; if that’s true the ambient realism of minimal recordings still needs drummers with great internal balance. Yes there are close mic techniques to bring greater control, but using the sound from these to raise the level of individual drums is completely different to capturing hits at the required level in distant mics.

Getting Natural Close Mic Drum Sounds - Accentize Chameleon 2

Accentize Chameleon 2 is a reverb modelling audio plugin - play it some reverb or ambience, and it automatically serves up a space to match. This has endless uses in post production mixing such as to match foley or ADR to the set, but it also has plenty of uses in music mixing as well.

In the video we use it to solve the problem of blending the big, brash sound of close mics with the drum sound in some nicely ambient overheads. In this drum recording the snare is hitting nicely in the distant mics, but the rack tom could do with a lift. By playing the overheads’ ambience into Chameleon 2, we apply that to the tom mic to avoid any conspicuous, dry “overdub effect” on drums that need a close captured lift. We also enhance the results by thinning out a little proximity in the close mic to ramp up the realism.

No-one is pretending that clever fixes can beat the most powerful factor of them all - recording well. Most musicians want to sound their best, and it’s not unknown for engineers to ask drummers to just hit the snare harder than before! That will always beat trying to fake it. But for all those other times where the band have gone, and a fix is needed, tools like Chameleon 2 can work really well. In this example just a little judicious EQ to make the close mic sound slightly less enormous is all that’s needed to help close mics to hide in plain sight.