Tadpui wrote: ↑Thu Jan 21, 2021 12:45 pm
Thanks Greg. You'd laugh if I could add up all of the time I've spent trying to tune the snare and toms. I'm running into all sorts of issues, especially with the floor tom. Now I've landed on a tom tuning where the intervals between them don't work...they kind of beat against each other.
But hey, I'm all for hearing even personal preference suggestions. I know we have very different kits, sizes, etc. But I'm all ears!
I'm planning to just sit down for a couple of hours and try several different positions for each mic, so I can get a better feel for what I actually like. All of my mic positions thus far are a mix of 2nd hand information, and educated guesses. I think it'll pay dividends to take the time to actually hear the difference for myself and make a decision based on actual experience.
Just from what little bit is there I actually thought the toms sounded the best. Nice and fat and they have "tone" to them without too much ringing and resonance, which I like a lot. I'm not one to force toms into intervals or specific notes. Some people are very successful with that, but I don't go there. I believe just make the drum sound as good as it can on it's own and the rest takes care of itself. You can fine tune the spread a little, but each tom has it's own happy spot and I believe it's best to just put it there and leave it be. But it just depends on what you want, like anything else. Another thing you can do to keep them from fighting each other is to tune them for the doppler effect. You get a downward pitch bend from each drum and besides sounding awesome it lessens the interference and sympathetic ring in the other toms.
As far as the rest, I think your kick and snare tuning could go further. The kick is a little basketbally. It's got a bit of that hollow ringy resonance like....a bouncing basketball. It's not too bad though. I've heard worse...on my own shit. It happens. The inside kick mic sounds about like what you'd expect. I brought your tracks into Reaper just to give it a spin through my own mixing ideas and I don't find the outside kick mic is adding much benefit until you flip the phase. Then everything gets massive. So there is wiggle room in those two kick tracks before you even get to EQ or compression and all that other stuff. And since you obviously have more than enough inputs (LOL), try a spot mic on the beater just to see what happens. Sneak a 57 right up next to the beater contact spot underneath the snare. Try to position it so it rejects the bottom of the snare. See if you get more thwack like that. And to take your kick miking even further, you're probably a great candidate for a sub-kick mic. I've toyed with the idea of building one but I just never need or want that much low end in my kick drum tracks. But for the drum sounds and styles you tend to like, I think one of those might be awesome. It's just a 6 or 8" speaker reverse wired to be a microphone. They kind of catch the pulse of the resonant head and add some oomph to kick tracks.
The snare...not a fan. I don't really like the low tuning. You haven't done anything wrong with it. It sounds in tune and sounds pretty meaty. I just prefer tighter snares. I think your mic positioning is good. You get pretty good rejection of the other stuff going on. I think it's important to find a top-snare mic position that rejects as much as possible because as you compress a snare mic it lets all that bleed get louder. For me I'm always fighting the hi hats. On these tracks your toms might be coming through a little too much so maybe look out for that. I've heard a lot of drum tracks where it's like you hear things twice. You hear the spot mics and overheads, and you also hear all that same stuff bleeding through the snare track. That's not good to me. You don't seem to have that problem so whatever you're doing is working.
Your overhead tracks have a nice spread and the kick and snare are centered. Nothing to fix there. Nice balanced representation of the whole kit so whatever you're doing there works.
The room condensers kick ass. I'd definitely stick with that arrangement. The mono ribbon room mic doesn't add anything IMO. But it's cool to have if you want it.
So yeah, all in all you're doing fucking awesome. Just keep experimenting. Drums are fucking hard to deal with.
