For Phase 2 of the Recording Process we moved to Ealing Film Studios 1 to track drums for our cover of “Out of the Black”. We got in bright and early to set up the drum kit. We hit the Low Tom around the live room until we found a good resonant spot in the room. This was where we thought the Kick Drum would be ideally placed. Once we had set up the Toms around the Kick Drum we decided to tune the High Tom to match the Floor Tom because the High Tom was ringing with a horrible overtone.
We were trying to achieve a tight drum sound to replicate the track and to do this we decided to avoid using a room mic but using a combination of close mic’ing and stereo mic’ing instead. The lack of a room mic was ideal to produce a crisper sound rather than an ambient sound.
To record the sound from the Kick Drum we used an RE20 Ribbon microphone angled to one side of the kick. We wanted to deaden the Kick Drum sound so we used 2 pillows inside the shell of the Kick Drum.
From what we have learned about stereo mic’ing techniques we thought that the best way to record the overall sound of the drums was to use the famous Glyn Johns technique on the overhead microphones. To achieve this we used a pair of AKG C414s distanced equally apart from the snare, one directed towards the Floor Tom and Ride, the other directed towards the Crash and Hi-Hat. (We measured the distance using the length of the headphone extension cable.)
http://therecordingrevolution.com/2011/01/10/the-glyn-johns-drum-recording-method/ (For more information on the Glyn Johns Drum recording technique.)
We also close mic’ed the snare with a Shure SM57 angled towards the edge of the drum head. There were a few minor issues we encountered when setting up the close mic: The clip on the mic kept falling down and changing the angle of the SM57. To solve this problem we simply changed the mic clip.
When all the mics were in place we connected each mic into the live room mic ties and took note of which mic ties were for which microphone. In the control room we then patched the live room mic ties into the Audient desk line inputs.
On the desk we made sure that the AKG C414s had phantom power and then we let Paul Sergeant play drums until we had signals coming into each channel. Then the levels were adjusted on each channel so that the recorded signal would not be clipping. This was then monitored in the control room and the Rednet output was patched to the Headphone amp in the live room.
In the pro tools session we made 4 additional mono audio tracks and setup the inputs to match the inputs into the desk. The tracks were then armed and ready to record. The click and the count in for our session was still messing around so we just used the count in and recorded Paul playing to the backing track which was soloed in the pro tools session.
We managed to successfully get 3 different takes and use the best parts of each take. All in all a successful day in the studio.
-JS