A little while ago, I took on a fairly rigorous, remote recording project. The client had to lay down drum tracks for nine songs, and only had the weekend to do it! Here's a summary of how it went down........
   

Gear Plan
Since my studio is not mobile in any way, I decided to rent all the gear and make my life easier.... the mics used were 2 AKG 451s on overheads, an AKG 460 on hi-hat, SM57 on snare, AKG D112 on kick, and 3 Sennheiser 421s on toms.

I wanted to live within (and the client's budget would only allow) a space of 8 tracks for all the drums and a guide track (click with bass line and vocals), so I ended up using an ADAT XT20 and a Mackie 1604vlz....
 

   
Setup and Sound Check
Get to the location - it's a basement room, about 25 by 10, carpeted, with blanket dampers hanging from the ceiling over the drums.... not always pretty (in this case, it actually looked good), but works to tame the unwanted "basement ambience." Even I was surprised at how much it dampened the room anomalies.... but still, I needed to tame the wall reflections so up went the thick moving blankets around the kit (which was already mounted on a carpeted drum riser.)

Set up the mics and stands -- now for the fun stuff -- power up the board and see what we got.... incidentally, since I was in the same room as the client, monitors were out... so my main monitoring was via BeyerDynamics 770Pro headphones (ideally suited to the task of remote location recording due to it's excellent response and effective isolation from exterior noise). The drummer got a feed from a pair of AUX's from the board, run into the massive sound blaster he had behind him, then using AKG M40FS cans from there. My assistant got the same phones feed off the board as I did.

Very first thing to check (instead of each individual mic) is the overheads and room mics - since I wasn't using room mics, that task was cut in half! Throw up the faders on the overheads and voila! The sound was there first shot - no cymbal flanging of any kind between the pair..... nice! Of course, all EQ was flat at this point........ the kit sounded sweet and solid, nice decaying on all cymbals sounds and nothing had any hint of harshness.

We're on the right track (ha!)--- next up, the kick.... oh uh... the drummer had a front shell on it with the hole cut out of the skin for live sound..... he wanted me to try it that way first - BIG problem... sounded tubby and flabby with no attack.... gotta get that skin off of there and bring the 112 inside the shell, with a nice damping blanket in there...... did that, adjusted the mic so it's about 5 inches and slightly off-centre of the beater.......... ahhhhh!!! That's the stuff -- nice, punchy, but with that kick you in the chest thump kinda sound... there we go....

Snare's up - nasty ringing... gotta muffle it a bit - we played with skin damping but there was still a hard ring that cut thru everything (and not in a good way...) More experimentation led to the drummer replacing the skin and putting a damping ring on it - perfect.... meaty sound, not the punchy tight jazz fusion type of snare, but that's what the material was calling for, so..... it sounded great!

Hi-hat - not too hard there... threw the 460 over the top, aimed down about 2-3 inches inside from the edge of the cymbal and aimed it to get the sweetest tone. 1 inch DOES definitely make a difference between harsh and soft. The drummer had strict orders not to move that mic even a fraction!!!!! When you find the spot, you gotta stick with it!!!

Now the toms......... these could have been easy, but they weren't......... heavy ringing, and the mics were picking up all kinds of buzzing from them... the hardware rattles were handled by tightening everything and when we thought we had it, everything was sounding good when we noticed a buzzing when the mid-tom was struck.... checking the rack and hardware again - nothing.... turns out that the tom's tuning was causing a resonance in it's own shell which the mic clearly picked up... the drummer changed the tuning of the bottom head a bit and the problem disappeared. Cleaned-up the mic positioning a little bit on all the toms and we're off to the races.................

So everything's sounding good at the board, we're feeling brave enough to get something on tape to see how we did........................... record... record... record.... then the interesting part.... playback! That kick is solid - exactly what we thought we heard during the soundcheck - excellent! Snare - needed some minor EQ tweaks, on the upper mids and a bit of high-end shelving (we're talking 3-4 dB at most, BTW!) Bring up the overheads - they rock... very sweet cymbal sounds, as is the hi-hat.... back to the tom stereo submix.......... another uh-oh.... pretty significant flanging between the toms tracks and the overheads - phase issue... I re-oriented the tom mics to a narrower area of the toms, and tried again... success - no flanging anymore!!! Again - can't stress enough, an inch can make a HUGE difference in what's being picked up by the mic.

So........ we record a bit, mainly 'cos I want to take the test cuts back to the studio to check it and make sure we're really hearing what we need to as it's being played back on the studio monitors. We shut 'er down for the evening and I head back to the studio, test cuts in hand.... power-up, hear we go... kick, overheads and hi-hat - very nice, smooth and sweet. Snare - not bad, still needs a bit more "snap", will adjust the mic tomorrow for that. Toms - a bit flabby with excessive low ring.... the mic's position can't be moved due to the phase problems, so we'll have to tame it with EQ a bit - oh well...
   

The Next 2 Days - Tracking
The next morning, after 3 Tim Horton extra large coffees, I make the necessary adjustments to the snare mic, and sweetened the EQ a tad on it as well... the drummer had re-tuned the toms, so we tried again... success, the ringing was gone... I simply had to brighten them up a bit with high-shelving EQ (and some low-cut filtering).

The recording starts - 3 tracks are down after 4 hours.... minimal punch-ins, with the drummer preferring to get the tracks down in one take as opposed to segments. Just as well, drum punch-ins can be difficult, even on digital gear due to the many overlapping cymbal sounds. Many drummers don't necessarily recall exactly which cymbal they struck at a particular point, so if they use something else and there's a punch-in, it sounds REAL obvious...

We ran into a problem with one of the clicks - on a particular solo section, the solo went off-time of the click, and it was impossible for the drummer to follow the click thru that - far too confusing... the lesson here, kids, is - if you're going the click/scratch track route to record, make sure whatever's on the click is in-time, the timing is a "by feel" thing, and it's tough to separate the 2 - following the click by feel, but then having to ignore an errant instrument at the same time... Anyways, this problem occurred on two of the nine tracks... I solved the problem by re-cutting the scratch tracks minus the bad solo bits, and it worked perfectly.

In the end we got 9 tracks of very solid, and very good sounding drums all done in a single weekend... I wouldn't want to do that too many times - it is very tiring after all (and if I thought *I* was tired, you should've seen the drummer!!!) -- but it's all worth it when you listen back to it and go "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, that's the stuff...!!!"

Sample Clip from the Session
(material copyrighted - clip used with permission - sampling or duplication is NOT permitted under any circumstances)

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Bruce Valeriani is the owner/engineer of Blue Bear Sound in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

     
Copyright © 2001 Bruce Valeriani, Blue Bear Sound