Getting that 'English' Drum

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This question seems to appear and I'm sure you already answered many times. However, I thought I'd share some of my personal experiences with all of you indie musicians out there in the recording studio at home, and maybe "be inspired to think" outside of the drum cage.

When I work in the music industry, I had the opportunity to work with Elton John during the recording of "Rock of the Westies" album. At this time, Roger Pope was his drummer. ButSince the signing of Sound was founded by producer Gus Dudgeon and drummer Nigel Olsson Elton earlier, were still sound in English. I will not discuss how he drums are here to vote, but of course, is that the part played in the last recorded sound. What I did know when the use of "Ambulance" was microphones. My guess is that you have never heard of a microphone ambulance. Well, I did not end until the coach explained.

The producer actually described it asEnvironment microphones. The ambulance was the word engineer personal joke. He called because he was said to be "there to" save the sound of the drum. It was an American engineer, was the inclusion of a much more controlled and sound from the drum with baffles and close miking techniques used tight. But Roger the battery on it was very "relaxed" and in addition to close mics on the drum overhead microphones were put in place the entire record amountStereo. Enter the "ambulance" microphones. These are two microphones at the top, the ceiling and about 25 meters from the battery. So they came to the ambient noise of the room.

When the mixing time were recorded their tracks at a low level that could improve the battery only with a great sound "room", but not by "presence" is required to be related distracted. I remember another group that the sound was a "big" drum so that they are more specifically the battery down (the study wasthe second floor), in the open kitchen with wood floors. He just had to rely on headphones to hear the other musicians, but in any case, that sound "wider".

With a limited budget, a lot of home recording studios are probably not a lot of microphones. In this situation, you should consider doing more overdubs - record instruments separately, sequentially. That would free the microphones in order to have more for the battery. Or maybe you could rent or borrowMicrophones from a local retailer or professional office. You could certainly try using only two microphones overhead on drums.

Finally, you will receive at home in your basement or garage, and see if that "big" drum sound, I hope this will spark your imagination and give you some of your ideas. However, if you live with your wife or mother, I would not recommend the use of the kitchen to record drums.

Getting A Good Drum Sound

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As someone who has been playing drums since a teenager and been an engineer for nearly 15 years one of the most important things for me in a song is getting a great drum sound. Before anything has been mic'd up or you've even got into a studio there are 3 important factors that can contribute to getting that all important great drum sound. These are ensuring the recording is being used on a professional maple or birch kit depending on the sound you are going for and not making do with a sub standard drum kit. The kit should have new heads and should be tuned to the key of the song as each drum holds a note. It should be tuned in the room it is being recorded in so the kit heats or cools to the room temperature. These points can make such a difference to a recording and to a detailed ea,r can be the difference between an average demo and a professional recording. The second factor is to use good quality mics and pre amps as you will only get good clarity and detail in depth on a recording with good mics. If you don't have a good source signal it will be incredibly hard to get a good final sound. The other factor is to ensure the player behind the kit is of a good standard for the music you are recording and has the ability to be tight with the band and know when to and when not to overplay. Being able to use dynamics within their playing can make a difference on a recording and paying attention to detail is always important when playing drums on a recording. The most important thing though is to be as tight as possible with the rest of the rhythm section.

The Bass Drum

One of the most important decisions when recording drums is to decide what mic or mics you want to use and getting the right positioning for them. The most commonly used bass drum mics are dynamic mic with the AKG D112, Shure Beta 52a, Audix D6 and the Electrovoice RE20 being popular choices. I personally would favour a Senheisser 421 on the beater and a good Neumann outside the bass drum to pick up the sub frequencies to blend with the clicky signal.

The close mic on the bass drum will have spill from the other drums and cymbals in particular the snare and tom toms. The best way to get around this is to use a gate. The attack should be set quite fast like with most other drums, in order to get a punchy sound. The release should be set to close fully once the sound has finished so you don't hear the spill but watch you don't set the release to quick and lose some of the source sound. Most drawmer gates can do a job on a kick drum.

The next thing is to set up a compressor on the bass drum. If you set an attack time which is a little slower (10 to 20mS), it will allow the click of the drum hit to pass through the compressor it is being compressed. To help get that clicky sound on the kick, use a ratio of around 3:1 and have the threshold set around an average of -4dB of gain reduction to each beat beat, the release should return to normal before each beat. A good kick drum compressor I find the TLA Audios Valve 5051 is a good kick drum compressor. You just need to make sure you drive the input to get a punchy sound.

If the kick doesn't have enough presence then try equalising around 4 and 7kHz on a mid Q just adding a little gain where you feel appropriate around these frequencies. This should give the kick more definition and make it cut through the mix. Most good Equalizing units should work but a personal requisite of mine is to use a valve EQ for added warmth. A good EQ for this although not valve and used more for mastering is Massenburgs GML 8200, this unit has several bands of fully parametric EQ for ultimate control.

The SPL Transient Designer allows you to change drum sound envelopes, meaning it possible to add or subtract attack and sustain. Once this has been done listen to the kick drum with the overhead mics and see how they sound together. With the overheads added the Bass drum should sound more natural and slightly ambient. Adjust the compression and EQ again if it needs it, but bear in mind that once the rest of the mix is added that the sound will might need minor adjustments again.

Snare Drum

The best way to record a snare drum I find is to use 2 mics, one above and one below the snare drum with the above mics phase reversed. Shure SM 57s tend to be a popular choice while I sometimes find 2 AKG C451s can do a good job.

Snare mics tend to pick up a lot of unwanted low spill from the kick drum and toms, and may pick up the hi-hats to. For this again gating is necessary preferably a frequency based gate with some bass end and treble rolled off where the problem occurs the side-chain input could be useful if found necessary.
If the snare needs more definition I tend to find adding around 1.8khz on a fairly tigh Q is where the crack of the snare is and can make it cut through the mix really well. If you need any extra crispness, then try a little high EQ at between 4 and 7kHz. To give a bit more body to the snare, sometimes a little gain between 110 to 160Hz can work well but watch you don't add to much as too much in this frequency range can muddy your mix.

Compression on the snare is also recommended to get a tight punch sound. Try not to over compress and be sure not to have the gain reduction go over -3 or 4 dbs. Most drawmer mics can do a good job on the snare although I quite like using an Urei 1176.

Toms Toms

The most common Tom mics are the dynamic Sennheiser MD421 which tend to be clipped onto the toms. As toms are normally hit during fill-ins and rarely anywhere else, then a gate is needed when they are not in use. Take off some low end from the gate's side-chain input will eradicate false triggering from kick-drum spill. If you struggle with getting a suitable gate a good alternative is lose the spill after the recording in your sequencer or tape machine.

I tend to give the Toms some definition give the small tom some boost around 6k the mid tom 5k and the floor tom some 4k. Obviously this is hugely subjective and depends on the sizes of the toms you are working on. Adding between 100Hz and 200Hz I tend to find good frequencies to work with for picking out the resonance of each tom. A fairly small reverb can be a good idea also to have the toms sit in their own space in the mix and also give a bit more of a live sound that the processing might have lost.

Again compression can be a good idea when recording the toms. Be sure to listen to the Toms with the overheads and not just isolated as the overheads play a large part in the final sound of the drums.

Hi-Hats

The AKG C451 is a popular hi-hat mic which works really well pointed away from the kit.
No gating is needed for the hats. Rolling off all the low frequencies is advised to lose the spill of the bass, snare and toms.

Overhead Mics

AKG 414s tend to be very popular overhead mics for a majority of people although I sometimes find them a little clinical. A personal favourite of mine are Coles 4038 or 4040 Ribbon Mics. They seem to get a great smokey sound that oozes expense to me. As Overheads pick up the cymbals and hats getting good definition on these mics is really important. For indie and jazz, using a lot of the overhead mix can be imperative. For rock and pop, I tend to use more of the individual mics and add a little over-heads subtly. I tend to find the overheads need no compression and should never be gated so an open sound is achieved.

A little equalising is sometimes necessary on the low end where the kick overspill may be a little much and there may be some phasing issues on the low end having used several mics in a relatively close space. Rolling a little low end here can help with both these potential issues. If the drums were recorded in a fairly small room sometimes a reverb can be added. I tend to find a Yamaha SPX 900 or the more expensive Lexicon PCM 80 can do a really good job here.

4 Steps to Learning How to Play Any Song on the Piano

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1. Determining the melody - Melodies are the actual tune to a song, some song are melodious and tend to be a bit flat but it sound good because it is sitting on a nice set of running chord. For beginner I would recommend starting with song that are melodious and get the tune of it, Play it on the piano in single tune, it means without the chords and bass lines. Melodies determine what chords will be played. If you can use your ear to figure out what notes are being played in the melody, you are 1/4 on your way to learning a song!

2.Harmonizing the melody - This part of it, is that you must have some understand of chords and how chords are form. In music and music theory a chord is three or more different notes that sound simultaneously. Once you have figured out the melody, it is time to harmonize it. This is simply choosing various chords to accompany the melody. There are several techniques and tricks to doing this. An example of a chord formation is always use the 1, 3 and 5 note of a scale for a major chord, example C chord is make up of C, E and G and a G chord is G, B and D.

3. Altering Chords - This is the best part! Now that you have strategically figured out the melody to a song and have harmonized it, altering your chords to produce certain sounds is the next step. If you were playing gospel music, you would alter your chords differently than if you were playing classical or country music.

4. Listening - After you have determined the melody, harmonized the melody, and altered some of your chords, there are various techniques you can use to make sure that your song sounds right. Personally I listen to the bass line and whether is from the bass guitar or from the piano this can help you more, the bass line does help you to determine the timing of the song too.

I personally learn all these theory from "The Secrets to Playing Piano By Ear" 300-pg Course by Jermaine Giggs and would strongly recommend this if you want to learn to play piano by ear. He has taught literally thousands of musicians how to play the piano by ear. This is very different from learning to read music score as what the classical pianist are trained.

Getting Your Song Idea Underway

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I had to write up a flow diagram the other day for the process I need to follow to get a song/lyric from idea to completion. You might find it useful:

1./ You are walking down the street thinking about nothing in particular. One thought leads to another and suddenly you are struck by what seems to be a great idea. A concept arrives waiting to be fleshed out. This is often called ' The Muse'. Any bit of inspiration or muse that passes by is worthy of pursuing. It might come from your walk down the street or it might come from an exercise such as object writing. Object writing is the process of writing from your senses about a particular object/thing/person/place or time, within a set time frame of 5 or ten minutes.

2./ If your great idea has not come from object writing then you need to do some; Find a quiet place to set yourself up with pen and notepad, or word processor if you're computer inclined. Set a stopwatch or timer, most mobile phones have one these days, and write for 10 minutes on your subject. For example this afternoon I came up with the concept of "losing altitude". This could be about a relationship running out of steam or taking a dip or going through a period of turbulence, so, the challenge is to get metaphors related to the concept and make them into useable phrases for our song. Here's some example writing;

Losing altitude, we're dropping down, my tummy is left up in the sky somewhere. Losing altitude, who's in control of this plane? I've got my hand on the controls, but you keep wrestling them away. While we're wrestling the plane is going into a dive and we're losing altitude. The ground is spinning up to meet us, I want to jump out of this plane and be free wheeling on a parachute, pulling my own cords, not be your puppet on a string. etc.

Usually you can find a few choice phrases from your stream of consciousness sense based writing that can be valuable to expand on, which is part 3.

3./ Pick key words or themes from your main idea and find rhymes. I am a great fan of the methods of Pat Pattison of Berklee Music college. In his book Writing Better Lyrics Pat advocates that we not just look for perfect rhymes, but also family rhymes, assonant rhymes and near rhymes. So, from our example we might look at the words altitude, dropping, sky, control, plane, dive, losing, spinning, parachute and cords, to find a database of rhymes we can use.

For "altitude" you might try: solitude, latitude, attitude, unscrewed, voodooed, argued, stewed, mood and feud. Now any of those combinations can open up a world of possibilities,but if you stick 'on theme' you might get a coupe of rhyming lines like;

Hey, I know we argued

and you're in a terrible mood

but, I'm reaching for my parachute, 'cos , [ I brought in one of the other key words which happened to be a near rhyme]

baby, we're losing altitude.

Not the greatest prose in the world but a starting point. What about dive? Drive, test-drive, arrive, survive, alive, real-life, jaws of life.

We're in a nose dive

this isn't a test-drive

if we're gonna survive

somebody's gonna have to go and get the jaws of life.

4./ Once you've got a few more ideas flowing try to story board your song and work out if there is a narrative flow. What will each part of the song say? To carry on the example, part one could be; boy and girl are going on holiday they are flying and he thinks that there are problems in the relationship. Part 2 could be the woman's perspective, what she thinks is wrong. Part 3, a bridge, might be them playing out disaster scenarios, and a final verse might be a happy ending as they are coming in to land at their destination, losing altitude, but in a controlled way. Could this journey be a plan to rekindle the romance?

5./ Rewrite the main idea using new lyrical/rhyming ideas within the story board

6./ If you're stuck for a rhythmic idea try to extract it from the working title of the song. Our working title of "losing altitude" could be broken up to represent he following; Loo-zing-al-ti-tude or, ta Tum ta ta Tum. Try ta Tum ta ta Tum at different speeds to see what matches the 'feel' of the song.

7./ Start speaking out loud some of your rough prose and rhyme to see how it might fit against the rhythm and start trying out melodic ideas

8./Hit the "record" button on your tape recorder or computer and get writing, and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, until you're done!