MS Audiotron MultiMix
Soundcraft Spirit Studio
Studio Rack: 1. D&R Mic Amp 2. Samson rack mixer 3. Behringer headphone ampI changed the drumheads and seated them. By seating I mean tuning them high and pressing them with my palm. I didn't change the kick drum head, because it was still sounding fresh enough. I left the tuning for tomorrow.
Saturday 27.9.2008
Matias picked me up and I started to tune the drums. I used my Ahead DrumDial to get the tuning to the right zone. Then I finished the tuning by ear. The tuner doesn't work very well with higher or very low tuning, so I needed to tune the snare drum and floor tom by ear. One thing I noticed was that the snare drum didn't sound "right". Luckily the sound was getting better and better throughout the soundcheck, so it was just the new drumhead tension. It was the first time I changed a new head to this snare drum, so I didn't know what to expect.
Next we sat down and started to plan what microphones and preamps we are going to use. After some serious thinking and testing, this is what we ended up using:
Kick Drum
I have been using Beyerdynamic M88 inside the kick drum for some time now. I really like the way it captures the midrange. You can really hear every hit clearly. It's not a sound that works in a mix without EQ (like Audix D6 could work), but who cares if the end result is great. I left my DIY subkick microphone out this time. I don't think I will miss it, because the sound we are after is pretty modern and I think I will need to add a layer of samples (triggering, what ever you want to call it) to the kick in the mixing stage to make it sound consistent. That's why I also recorded the DDrum trigger "splats". Actually, I would have recorded them anyway, because the "clicky" sound it gives is very useful in itself.
Snare Drum
Miking a snare drum is pretty easy. Most of the time Shure SM57 works very well on top and Sennheiser MD441 on bottom. We tried my other favourite, EV Co4. The sound was pretty cool, but the cymbal and hihat bleed sounded bad. When we compared EV to Shure, the EV had a nice "gritty attitude", but Shure captured a wider range of sound. It still needed something, so I asked Matias to drive the preamp harder to get some saturation. After he found the sweet spot, we were happier than ever! Getting a good saturation out of a microphone preamp is very important for me. Luckily I have 10 channels of MS Audiotron MultiMix (Finnish console manufacturer from the 80's, uses Lundahl transformers) and 16 channels of Soundcraft Spirit Studio. Both of them have great saturation characteristics, but MS is usually my first choice.
One thing I wanted to do differently this time was to add another mic to the side. I have never done it before, so I didn't know how it would sound. We tried Audix i5 (dynamic) and it sounded ok. I was not sure if it added enough to the sound, so we decided to try another mic, Shure PG81 (condenser). The difference was huge. It was much brighter and sounded more "full-range". I'm sure the side mic track will come handy in the mixing.
Toms
Not much to say about toms. When the tuning is right, they sound good. I used my old Sennheiser BF504's on rack toms and Sennheiser E602 on floor tom. I really like how the E602 sounds. It cuts a lot of midrange and adds some low end. It sounded ridiculously huge through our subwoofer in the control room!
Cymbals
It's pretty easy to get a good cymbal sound if you make sure the microphones are picking all the cymbals and the distance between snare drum and the main microphones is equal. By main microphones I mean the overhead pair. If you are close miking the cymbals then it's not possible to do it like this. I added another mic for the hihat (Shure SM7B), ride (Shure PG81) and china (GA Project FC4). We compared the PG81 and FC4 on ride and china. FC4 was too bright and thin for the ride but worked well with the china. I thought about adding another mic for the splashes, but ended up not doing it.
Room and Ambience
We recently bought a pair of cheap T.Bone RM700 ribbon microphones to the studio. I really love to use them as room microphones. The sound is very dark and unique. Because they have a bi-directional polar pattern, I used the Blumlein configuration. Really nice and three dimensional sound! We tried to get some saturation from the preamp, but we ran out of gain. These microphones have a really low output. I placed the pair pretty low, because I wanted to capture the sound of the room and not too much cymbals.
I also added a mono room microphone just in case: a Shure SM57. Sometimes it adds "glue" to the drums in a mix. We also have a really HUGE sounding hallway. I placed another SM57 there.
Sunday 28.9.2008
Matias picked me up again and we started the day by checking that everything still sounded like we wanted. We found nothing to complain about. I started to warm up Matias tweaked the headphone mix to my liking. I wanted to hear every kick drum hit clearly, so Matias added some software "triggering" to my headphone mix. During the day I managed to record three songs. Most of the time it was not easy and we needed to do a lot of compiling from different takes. One thing that I am very proud of is that I played some really dangerous sounding fills! I mean like "oh no, you are gointo to fuck up... WOW! you saved it!". Later Riku, Olli and Sami joined us and they seemed to like everything.
We are going to continue tomorrow night. So far it looks like I don't need to program the drums on this record. I just need to edit them a lot, haha :D
Alright! We have been finishing the song structures during the last few months. The final phase is to build the tempo maps. We will start the drum recordings this saturday at our own Drop Hammer Studios. I have three weeks to do the drums and editing. May sound like too much time, but I have to go to work and I have a mixing project going on as well. I really hope that editing the drums won't eat most of my time, haha! Then we will continue with bass and guitars in a cabin near Lahti. I bet Ville (Sorvali, the producer) will eat a few sausages. Matias (my partner in crime at Drop Hammer) will handle the drum recording duties but I will take all the responsability of the actual engineering decisions. You can expect some serious studio porn in this blog!
Let me start by telling more about the actual recording space. It's a 44 m2 space divided into a live room and a control room. Both of the rooms are acoustically treated and feature a laminate floor. Very nice and tight sound! The live room has more treating including loads of rockwool in the ceiling and corners. Some "acoustic foam" and carpet is also used to kill the most vicious upper midrange and high frequency reflections on the walls.
The drumset I will use is a full birch set (80's Tama Crestar, same as Grandstar Custom 8", 10", 12", 14" and 22") with a Ludwig Supra-Phonic (5") snare drum. I just recently bought this snare after dreaming of it for years. Absolutely amazing! I might use my trusty old Sonor Phonic D420 (3 1/2") on faster songs. Don't know yet. My drumheads will be the following:
Most of the cymbals are made by Paiste (Signature, 2000, 2002 and Rude 1000) and Stagg (two splashes). Anything else? Oh, I am using Iron Cobra Power Glide pedal with felt beaters. Why felt? I get a better feel with them and some times wood beaters are making the sound too clicky to start with.
That's it for now.
