Recording drums on a budget

One mic recording / Three mic recording (SM57/SM58)
Recording Drums With Only One Mic (Condenser cardioid)
How To Record Drums - With 1 Mic (Condenser cardioid) Tchad Blake method

And my favourite:
With two mics (Recorderman Drum Mic Technique)

what does a 1994 Jeep Cherokee a MacBook Pro and Audio files have in common?

a really nice mixing environment! over the years i've read in countless articles how it's good practice to listen to your mix in the car because of the acoustics and that there aren't much bass buildup. so i decided to mix a song in my trusty old Jeep; Julie aka Jules... and the result was awesome!! i can't believe how everything just sounded different and that there wasn't a lot of room EQ problems.

i've got an above average sound system in but nothing too fancy. what i've done was using the aux input of the stereo and the headphone out of the mac. the mac sound card is 48khz and that's also what i record at so no problems there. the result WOW! i'm going to try it in my friends fancy new car with a fancy big sound system and see if i get a better result. if i do i'll have to buy a new car with an awesome sound system :)
i might even buy a van. nice thought - getting the bucks to buy it is something else...

room EQ

i'm thingking about room EQ... just not sure if i should just slap some EQ on the "logic bus" or if i should get a hardware rack EQ.

now i know a lot of people are against it but i haven't got money for some fancy room EQ plugin. the bass traps work great but there's still a spike at 125hz. (i've tested it with this bass tone sweeping from 40Hz to 300Hz).

other ways to do it:

http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net

http://pcazeles.perso.cegetel.net/acxo.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkj_VMB9m4E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKjskxpNL5c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqMMTyXTLDA

http://www.realtraps.com/art_audyssey.htm

there's something very attractive about magnetic tape - no pun intended

i've done a little experiment. i decided that - hey, before i'm going to master this sucker i'm going to record the mix-down to a normal analogue tape cassette (compact cassette). then once it's on tape i'm going to record it back into logic with a little analogue hardware compression, a samson s-com 4 (-2db threshold). then layer it under the digital recording so that you can just hear it but not so much that it change the mix-bus compression... man do i like the effect!!!! it's just - and i hate it when people say it - warmer sounding. maybe it's all in the mind but there's something cool and funky about the result. try it...

here's a cool read if you're a history fan like me.

compressor settings

i don't know about you but when i started recording i didn't have a clue what to set the compressor to when i record a specific instrument. here are a few guidelines.

note that these are the settings for recording an instrument, so you don't want to squeeze the hell out of your signal. you just want to tame the peaks but still leave enough dynamics for the mixing stage.

guitar/bass: set the ratio 4:1 and adjust the threshold until you get a gain reduction of about 10db on the loudest parts.

drum overheads: set the ratio 6:1 and adjust the threshold until you get a gain reduction of about 20db to 22db on the loudest parts. you can use the same settings for the snare and toms. (if i record the drum set i always use the recorderman technique) and then put a mic on the snare and bass... just in case.

vocals: set the ratio 4:1 and adjust the threshold until you get a gain reduction of about 6db on the loudest parts.

mix bus compression: set the ratio 2:1 and adjust the threshold until you get a gain reduction of about 2db on the loudest parts.

attack and release: my hardware compressor doesn't have knobs for these but if yours does i'd say use your ears. you don't want the attack to kill the transients and you don't want the release holding it too long or not long enough, depending on the application and source. so use your ears.

note that the above are just a few guidelines - so tweak to taste but remember to leave enough dynamics for the mixing stage.

after recording a band

now i've recorded the band. now what? here's a snippet of an email that i send to one of the band members that i recently recorded.

..."just want to give you an update of what's happening... for the next week or so i'm going to go through the material with a fine tooth come and select/match up the good bits of Craig's guitar parts. that means listening through all the tracks and making notes of the track number and where in the song the good parts are i.e. "song one" - great solo at 2:15 - track 3) - with the help of some red wine :) 'For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.' - Friedrich Nietzsche"...

after that; the mixing begins!

dithering

dithering is - man this is difficult to describe - i guess i can say that it’s adding noise to your audio to prevent harshness. in other words, it smooth things out and make it sound less jagged and raw. it's almost like a filter on a camera to soften the image or like blurring the lines of your pencil drawing... i'm more of a picture person so i’ll explain it with a few illustrations below where i'll use colour instead of sound. i guess the guys from Izotope Ozone describe it best - quite a good read. if you want to know more about 16-bit vs. 24-bit TweakHeadz is the place to go.

the gradient fill on the left represents the audio we want to capture... :)

we record at 24-bit (bit is short for binary digit = 10110 etc). i’ll illustrate 24-bit as 24 colours.

when you export your mix/master to CD it goes down even further to 16-bit. why? because CDs can only read 16-bit data.

to fix this raw sounding audio file you apply dithering. now it looks (sounds) more like the original audio we intended to capture :)

there is no magic

over the years, i've heard people refer to ''studio magic'' as if there is some sort of magic knobs the engineer/producer can do to make everything sound great. in the end, people make recordings... not machines... not gadgets. so, much of the tone of the drums, bass, guitar and vocals is within the musician themselves. don't believe me? hit the drums and try to make them sound bad! intentionally make your guitar sound bad just by the way you are playing. it's not difficult to make an instrument sound bad. obviously, the better the player, the better tone they can get out of it. for example: Dave Grohl on a kids drum set.