Let's talk (budget) home recording setups!

[Badgroover]

Hey Steve,
Quick question about the new gear you have bought:
Have you tried playing along to a track via a player plugged into the Personus? And if so, can you hear the track and the drums in your headphones without any delay? The Personus device claims to have no delay during monitoring and I was wondering if you have had a chance to confirm this.

[Arnaud_Donnez]

Another test. Some clipping on and off, still tweaking the setup.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BwncpvRwVY

Excellent playing Steve !
Concerning the overall sound, did you try to add some "air" to the mix by using a good condenser mic in the room ? I think it's the best way to have a natural, big fat sound (in my case, close mics are only here for reinforcement). Generally, i put a single mic a few feet in front of the drums, and one inch higher than the cymbals. Then, i use some VST plugins like the Waves C1 or Sonalksis SV-315 Mk2 in order to compress the signal a bit...it makes a big difference in the end, if you don't like the dry/clean type of sound.

I found that by surfing on Google :

http://www.shure.com/idc/groups/public/ ... ums_ea.pdf

Very instructive (you will find the advices of famous drummers, about the way they like to set up the mics. I liked it a lot !)

[cjbdrm]

Hey Steve, your playing is great as always! I hope you don't mind- found a video from a while back that I wanted to share with you.

Cheers

[Josiah]

Holy F****

It's really hard to concentrate on how it sounds when you play like that Steve.... damn that phrasing at 37 seconds in is just nasty cool.

[Kurtis]

great playing as usual Steve. the drums sound great. the 1o and 16 sing. great tone. i want them drums

[Steve Holmes]

Arnaud, very helpful thanks. I'm gonna mess with backing the mics off and let em breath a bit. Great vid cjbdrm, interesting to see and hear the difference with subtle changes in position. I'm excited about being able to experiment with this stuff at my leisure =)

[Arnaud_Donnez]

I'm gonna mess with backing the mics off and let em breath a bit

When it comes to natural sounding kits, with a lot of air, i always keep Jojo Mayer in mind.
This particular video shows us many important things about the placement of condenser mics :



He uses two "room" mics located behind him (i guess these are Neumann U87...could someone confirm this ?), facing the toms and snare. I don't even know whether it's a new way to set the overheads or a sound engineer"trick" to capture the best roomy sound...in all case, the result is impressive. I've tried to approach that sound in one of my personal session, by using a similar procedure, and it was probably the biggest improvement i made since i started to record my drums.

[Jim Richman]

Need attack on your kick. No need to stuff the mike inside, or jack up the treble. Just rest the mike in the hole an inch or so, peeking in. Then bus your Kick to an aux channel. Use a hipass filter around 1000hz. Then compress at 30:1, or use a limiter. You may even want to use a noisegate before this to adjust the length of the kick resonance. I also bus the kick out and use a sub-bass chain to add low end as well. Mixing all three kick chains together will give you a lot of variety of sounds from one microphone.

I have been working setting up gates for toms snare and kick. Just need to find the right decay, threshold etc.... It really cleans up the cymbals, making a overhead and room mikes more effective. If you solo your toms, you will hear all the cymbals. Gate them, finding the right natural setting, and the cymbal bleed will be gone---letting you turn up and down the overheads.. I have not tried gating with straight ahead styles. I imagine it can be done, it's all about the settings. But with lower dynamics, the bleed usually is not that bad anyway.

[deseipel]

I'm gonna mess with backing the mics off and let em breath a bit

When it comes to natural sounding kits, with a lot of air, i always keep Jojo Mayer in mind.
This particular video shows us many important things about the placement of condenser mics :



He uses two "room" mics located behind him (i guess these are Neumann U87...could someone confirm this ?), facing the toms and snare. I don't even know whether it's a new way to set the overheads or a sound engineer"trick" to capture the best roomy sound...in all case, the result is impressive. I've tried to approach that sound in one of my personal session, by using a similar procedure, and it was probably the biggest improvement i made since i started to record my drums.

I think it's just the engineer using the recorderman overhead technique?

http://www.hometracked.com/2007/05/12/r ... technique/