Greg_L wrote: ↑Sat Oct 08, 2022 11:58 am
Armistice wrote: ↑Sat Oct 08, 2022 6:10 am
What is it you don't like? More info...
I think for me it's the top end in the room reflection. Drum rooms can be bright and reflective, and room mic placements can be tailored to help or subdue whatever the room is doing. But there's something sizzly in the "room" sound on your drum track that's just too much for my tastes.
I've always been flying blind with the VST drums, not being a drummer and never having recorded real drums.
VST cymbals are just a constant annoyance - can never get anything like what real cymbals sound like - so far at least, after only years and years of fucking around with this and that parameter.
I've moved away from using ReaVerb and those impulses you shared with everyone years ago, and I'm using a specific reverb plug-in called Ambience as a send, just for drums - and the preset is "Papien snare room 3" whatever TF that actually means.
I could send the overheads to a different reverb easily enough, but what should it be? And a lot of the snare sound is coming from the "Overheads".
I've never tried but I'm sure I can send the cymbal "overheads" to a different track than the drum "overheads" if there's a point to doing so, but my big problem with drums is, and always has been, not knowing which direction to go.
Any tips?
I think VST cymbals are just a problem no matter what.
One thing you just said that has me confused...what's the difference between your "cymbal overheads" and "drum overheads"? To me they're the same thing. If you have two instances of the same thing happening that's probably not a great thing to have going on. I don't know what program you're using or how they label things. To me I can imagine "cymbal overheads" being spot mics on cymbals or the actual drum overheads. And "drum overheads" being actual drum overheads or room mics. I don't know how they're differentiating the two.
In my limited experience I've found that VST overheads are usually way way more roomy than real world drum overheads. Even in a live room, true drum overheads are for capturing the whole kit and the room ambience is fairly minimized because drum overheads usually point downward towards the kit. Overheads are not room mics. So it might be worth trying to
not send them to the same reverb as everything else. Or don't give them any reverb at all. And then use a reverb for the rest of the kit that matches the size and tone of the room sound you're getting in the overheads.
And lastly, there's balance. It's all personal taste and how you wanna mix, but to me mixes that have roomy drums and dry everything else is off-putting. It's like...why did they stick the drummer out in the garage while everyone else is right up here in my face? It's weird. Your guitar tracks are very clean and present, but your drums have tons of room on them. If you like it that way, then rock on. But you can bring it all together and keep your drums still kind of roomy if you use more of the close mics from the drum tracks.
Bear with me, this takes some explaining, but I'll get to your final point, which I've just worked out, at the end.
I use Steven Slate 4. Everything is infinitely tweakable, and that's half the issue. I'm using the unprocessed samples, not the pre-processed ones. Apparently.
Each drum has a variety of output options. For instance, snare has top mic, bottom mic, overhead and room. Hi hats have mic, overhead and room. Less commonly used symbols (china, for instance) have only overhead and room. See the top two pics for the snare and hit hat routing options...
Drums.jpg
Anything can be routed anywhere - there is an overhead stereo channel that all the overhead feeds are routed to, but it's just stereo track 1. Room is stereo track 2. See the 2 pics below - in the bottom pic down at the bottom right, you can see overheads as stereo track 1.
Drums2.png
What I was saying was that
IF I wanted to, I could route the "overheads" for the cymbals to a different stereo track than the overheads for the drums, because it's just routing. I know you can't do this in real life, of course, but as a virtual instrument with unlimited routing possibilities, it's possible. I
don't do it, but I
could, I think.
But why would I? Only if there was some benefit to having a different treatment to the cymbals that the drums wouldn't get, in the "overhead" track - reverb is the most obvious, but there are other possibilities I'm sure. I'm just trying to make virtual drums sound like real drums, so I'm not fucking around with the more arcane processing possibilities at all - but I imagine, if you wanted to, you could take all your tom overheads and put them on a separate track and apply some weird effect to them... for instance.
Anyway, I'm not doing this, I was just spitballing the possibility.
What I am struggling with is the amount of the final snare tone that comes from the overheads - all the high end and the crack is coming from there - the top mic always just sounds dull and thuddy - you can add top end of course via eq, exciter etc. but it generally sounds rubbish. The meat of the sound is coming from the top mic, the definition from the overheads. I've been trying to balance these two things for years so I don't get the snare that either takes your head off or is like hitting a cereal packet. Takes forever.
As I was just upstairs doing the pictures I had a brainstorm - so your question may have led me accidentally to the answer to at least one problem.
I have the bottom mic and room mic set muted, because I hate the snare rattle from the bottom mic, and I've never really understood the need for room mics - not saying they don't have a use, I just don't get it. See previous comments about not having recorded real drums.
Have a look at any of the pics above and you'll see Attack / Sustain / Release - now I worked out on the last album that the only way to get the toms under control was to severely tweak these parameters but I'd never really played with them for snare - only this year, recording the next album, did I work out (duh!) you can control the quality of the sound from the close mic of the snare by dialling up the attack to reduce the initial crack, and I can get rid of the rattly shit I hate by putting the sustain to almost zero and curtailing the release. By default, snare drums come with 0 attack, 5 seconds sustain and 10 seconds of release. Now who needs a 15 second long snare sound? If you don't touch them, that's what you get. So when that penny dropped I started really tweaking those 3 parameters to get what I was perceiving as a better snare, based on what I hear from real drums on real releases.
The penny that just dropped was that I routinely turn the bottom mic off completely because it has more of the rattly snare stuff for obvious reasons, but that's where the top end probably also lies - so perhaps, instead of just doing what I've always done, I turn the bottom mic back on, and use the attack / sustain / release parameters to get the rattle out of it and just use it for more detailed top end and thus, do what you suggested in your final sentence "if you use more of the close mics from the drum tracks" and pull the snare out of the overheads a lot more.
So that's what I'm going to try. Thanks!
And then I can start playing with the same parameters for the cymbals to see if I can get more definition from them. More direct with some attack, less overhead, might work. Worth a try.
As usual, physically typing out my issues in depth helps me solve them, one way or the other.
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