Brief Summary

Recording drums offers so many possibilities compared to many other instruments that it can be tempting to do too much. A less is more approach can often yield better results but if your drum sound needs some help we’ve never had more help available than we do today.

Going Deeper

Recording drums is one of the tasks I look forward to most in the studio. The reason is that in a typical band recording it’s the most complex source we’re faced with regularly. In terms of the number of mics and the variety of sounds captured it doesn’t have an equivalent until we’re faced with large ensembles like big bands and orchestras, tasks which require a whole new set of skills to get right.

The options when it comes to capturing drums are potentially bewildering and when I used to teach studio recording the first drum session usually went the same way for every cohort regardless of experience. Things got complicated, fast!

Every available mic was placed on the kit until it resembled a mechanical spider of stands and cables. Knowledge which sounded suspiciously like second-hand opinions read online (yes I’m aware of the irony…) was exchanged and usually presented as accepted truth and beyond question. But the thing which didn’t happen was any listening!

Considering the enthusiasm with which every available piece of equipment was used when setting up, when when the first recording was made something which was rarely considered for use was the mute button. Every mic which was set was kept.

Less Often Really Is More

There was a time I used to resist this ‘all in’ method. In later years I found the best approach was to let them follow their assumptions and then to show how, very nearly all the time, the results could be improved by listening and taking away.

With the more experienced groups I’d do this by stripping things back and introducing just enough: Do you need that hi-hat mic? What does that ride mic achieve? Why are there three mics on the kick? Often the motivation was for greater control, far too often it was about trying to eliminate spill between mics and predictably there was an equivalence being drawn between ‘more’ and ‘better’. And usually too much assumption and not enough checking!

My favourite approach for the inexperienced groups was to set up a race. They had 10 minutes to mic up the kit aiming for the punchiest drum sound possible. Inevitably the mic stand spider would engulf the kit ( and some really chaotic cabling but fair enough, it was against the clock). They would record a test and take it all away again. Then I would go in and put a Crown PZM on the floor a few feet in front of the kit and tell them I was done. Inevitably my single mic recording had far more punch than their phasey mess. Protests about the PZM being special in some way would result and then I’d take their recording and try each mic in turn on its own until I found the best one and compare it to their ‘full’ recording. Bringing in a couple of other mics usually got a reasonable drum sound with the whole kit represented adequately.

It sounds like a cheap trick, in a way it was, but those students had to get it out of their system. If I’d told them that they weren’t ready for a bazillion mics on their kit, it would just have made it more attractive. The PZM trick was a good one though…

A Drum Kit Is One Instrument

Failing to see a drum kit as a single instrument is the most common misconception I’ve seen in novice engineers. The hi hat might well be bleeding onto the snare but unless the bleed sounds bad, it doesn’t matter. In a conventional recording you’re not going to solo or mute those elements because they belong together. Embrace the bleed, it’s a part of the sound of the instrument. It is the context in which that kit piece belongs and context should guide all of our decisions.

In my world faithfully capturing the sound and maintaining a do no harm approach to the natural timbre of the instruments usually works fine, but there are times when the natural sound needs a little help and in these cases, beyond channel EQ, high pass filters and a little compression, there are a handful of tools which earn their place time and time again when I’m approaching drums. Here are some of my favoured choices, they aren’t a definitive list of must-haves and if yours are different please share them, and some thoughts on when and why they get used. But for me these are four tools which get used when nature needs a little help:

Sound Radix Auto Align 2

I’ve got firm views about this one. I don’t use it as a matter of course. Though since the new version, Auto Align 2, I’ll usually try it. In the old days of Auto Align it required a degree of setup time and choices had to be made about exactly what should be aligning to what. Auto Align can cause dramatic improvements in drum recordings, but it depends on what phase issues were present on the recording in the first place. It’s very programme-dependent. It can make a huge difference but it can also achieve only a minimal amount. The temptation is always there to think that it ‘corrects’ your recording, so the untreated original is somehow ‘wrong’. This is of course not the case. Like most things it depends and great sounding records with great sounding drums have been happening for decades before phase alignment in post was possible.

Frequently I prefer the results without Auto Align. That’s not because Auto Align isn’t good. It’s always been good and version 2 is astonishing in its effectiveness and elegance. It’s just that the sound of multiple mics, well placed on a drum kit, with their associated timing differences is part of the sound of records. Much like spill, it’s only a bad thing if it sounds bad.

Sonnox Drum Gate

On the subject of spill, this plugin makes me want back all the hours I’ve spent chasing down unwanted spill in drum recordings. The defaults usually work well enough not to need any tweaks beyond adjusting the decay, which varies across the spectrum to allow all of the fundamental of that floor tom through while avoiding the residual kit noise. Perhaps it’s the simplicity of the basic gating features and their effectiveness which means the other features can potentially get overlooked. Drum Gate incorporates a leveller which, rather than controlling the level of individual hits by reducing the instantaneous level relative to a threshold, uses the same machine learning it uses to identify individual hits for gating purposes and instead changes the level of those hits relative to a threshold. If you’re familiar with Sound Radix’s Drum Leveler you’ll understand the concept. Did you know it’s also a feature of Drum Gate?

A use I put Drum Gate to regularly, even when I’m not using it as a gate his to quickly extract MIDI from audio parts. Although you can now do this directly from within Pro Tools, this workflow pre-dates this and as Drum Gate is such a regular feature of my sessions I find myself using this instead. Particularly as it can differentiate between types of drums so well. Which brings me to the subject of drum replacement/augmentation.

Toontrack EZ Drummer

Many years ago in my teaching days I overheard a couple of students discussing music. One of them was enthusing about a record he’d heard by a 70s rock band. He said that the drum sound was amazing and how surprised he was as he “didn’t think they even had drum replacement in those days”… I’ve used this story many times to illustrate the perils of reliance on using technology as a substitute for doing a good job in the first place. Some might say that it doesn’t matter and that no-one cares how you made it as long as it sounds good but, while I see the point they are making, I can’t completely agree with that.

The phrase drum ‘replacement’ is interesting though as I can’t think of the last time I completely replaced a drum, I do find I sometimes augment them, layering the sound of kit elements with samples. One of the most common culprits is the kick drum and rather than trying to sculpt the sound of the kick with compression and EQ, or using techniques like the sub bass tone generator trick or it’s more modern alternative Metric Halo Thump, these days I create MIDI triggers on a duplicate track and  layer my original kick with a kick from EZ Drummer. The responsiveness of Toontrack’s incredible sampling is far superior to a couple of samples. Does anyone remember Digidesign’s SoundReplacer? Tucking in a supporting Toontrack kick underneath the original (with some phase work courtesy of Auto Align 2) can yield dramatic results and feels authentic enough for my naturalistic sensibilities. I admire the work done in modern metal production but I’d never try to do that kind of work myself.

Oeksound Soothe 2

Static EQ does most frequency-related jobs most of the time but a new generation of clever, semi-automatic EQ’s have come to the fore in the last few years. This is a fast moving area and one I try to keep abreast of but the product which has arguably done more than any other to show itself to be the kind of problem solver even the most set-in-their-ways pro can’t ignore has to be Oeksound’s Soothe 2. On drums this can be invaluable in addressing issues caused by unpleasant build-ups of energy from the cymbals. A great drummer makes more difference to a recording than any gear choice but beyond the feel of the player in terms of timing and groove, a great drummer also has great internal balance, knowing how to play to produce a mix-ready result. Almost a case of put the faders to zero and it’s done. My most common issue with drummers who aren’t yet at that level is nasty cymbals. “Smack the drums, tickle the cymbals” I’ve been heard to suggest in the past. Soothe 2 does more to help in these cases of sometimes less than top quality cymbals being played with (ahem) ‘enthusiasm’. Its ability to achieve great results fast is addictive and if you need extra control, it’s there.

Doing Less

My approach isn’t particularly invasive. I like to leave things as I find them when possible, with the majority of the work happening at the recording stage, but when things need help, we’ve never had so much help available. How do you treat your drums?