Plug Your own Band & Mp3 thread.

[Crowella]

Hold on Dave, did you record the drums with only one mic?

 

If you have only two overhead mics, look up the recorderman setup. Will get you a pretty good sound with a pretty easy setup.

[Dave.]

.

 

I thought he was talking about purely overhead mics. We had a mic on the kick drum too.

[Dave.]

Hold on Dave, did you record the drums with only one mic?

 

If you have only two overhead mics, look up the recorderman setup. Will get you a pretty good sound with a pretty easy setup.

 

We had one mic overhead and one on the kick drum. Both were dynamic.

[Dominic.]

If you wanted to cheat couldn't you just use the two mics as overheads then do another take mic'ing say the kick and snare? What mics are they?

[haze015]

Set up one microphone about 6 feet away, slam it through some old school compression emulation and sound instant 60's Garage/Joe Meek.

[kueller]

I thought he was talking about purely overhead mics. We had a mic on the kick drum too.

 

Well it kind of is just using overheads, but if you were using 2 mics you could've done it. I know a video that describes recording and mixing the setup. I'll find it if I can.

 

I think it's the same method Crowella is on about too.

[Dominic.]

Both were dynamic.

 

More about freq response

[Crowella]

So that snare out on the far right basically meant the drums were panned hard right?

 

If you only have those mics, I would go with what Haze said in that case. It'll work in a jam session kind of way. Leave the stereo enhancement out of it.

 

Also, this is what two overheads can give you. What I would call reasonable. No compression or any effect here, just two "average" quality overhead mics.

 

(the faint taps that sound metallic once or twice in this soundcloud are the drummer being lolz funny and hitting the mic stands with his sticks)

[soundcloud]

[/soundcloud]

[Dave.]

If you wanted to cheat couldn't you just use the two mics as overheads then do another take mic'ing say the kick and snare? What mics are they?

We were going to do that but we were concerned about timing issues.

Set up one microphone about 6 feet away, slam it through some old school compression emulation and sound instant 60's Garage/Joe Meek.

Well it kind of is just using overheads, but if you were using 2 mics you could've done it. I know a video that describes recording and mixing the setup. I'll find it if I can.

 

I think it's the same method Crowella is on about too.

 

Our drummer wants his bass drum to be heard properly so we insisted on a mic at the bass drum. His the drummer so we just went with what he wanted. I think the drums came out quite good.

[Dominic.]

We were going to do that but we were concerned about timing issues.

 

Tighten up your playing. Plus if you're that bad you can always shift and realign the hits

[Dave.]

So that snare out on the far right basically meant the drums were panned hard right?

 

If you only have those mics, I would go with what Haze said in that case. It'll work in a jam session kind of way. Leave the stereo enhancement out of it.

 

Yes, like everything else for some unholy reason.

 

We're thinking of investing in a mixing board and borrowing a few mics for the next recording session so a live take could be possible.

[kueller]

Our drummer wants his bass drum to be heard properly so we insisted on a mic at the bass drum. His the drummer so we just went with what he wanted. I think the drums came out quite good.

 

Here's one video I found.

 

Bass drum sounds good enough. To be honest I think it's worth sacrificing some of the bass drum hit for an overall better drum sound.

[Crowella]

Kueller has it. Best setup for any beginner drummer to use. Dynamic mics like the SM57 aren't going to be the best in your case unless you want to whack them on snare/tom duty.

 

Use some condenser mics for overheads. Maybe use other mics on snare/kick/cymbals later on. The more you add, the more annoying the recording/mixing process will be. Try a simpler method first, get comfortable with it then continue from there.

[haze015]

You need to work out what the relationship between the kick drum and bass is, otherwise that'll get very messy, very quickly. The importance of this is more emphasised in dance music, but still important in all genres.

 

If you want a big kick, then you need to keep the bass thin or if you want a deep, subby bass, then got to keep the kick thin.

[Dave.]

This is really handy stuff!! Not many bands get this info after their first demo

[kueller]

If you want a big kick, then you need to keep the bass thin or if you want a deep, subby bass, then got to keep the kick thin.

 

I've never heard it like that actually. I'll have to keep it in mind for the future.

[kueller]

This is really handy stuff!! Not many bands get this info after their first demo

 

kunts deliver

[Dave.]

kunts deliver

 

They really do!

[haze015]

I've never heard it like that actually. I'll have to keep it in mind for the future.

 

Like I said, its more obvious in dance music. So something like Electro will favour the kick whereas D&B will favour bass, which was quite obvious in the early days of the genre.

 

In guitar based music, reggae will favour the bass guitar over the kick and something like punk where the bass will generally be root notes filling out the guitar, a fat kick will do more for the track. 70's punk bands with big reggae influences actually tended to do the former as a result, listen to The Slits' cover of Heard It Through The Grapevine.

[Lexical_Whale]

I've never heard it like that actually. I'll have to keep it in mind for the future.

 

Pretty much goes for any instruments that have overlapping frequency ranges. You only have so much 'space' in a mix and if you've got a lot of different elements competing for the same frequencies they'll end up losing definition and getting lost. The same principle can be applied to getting separation between different guitar tracks if you boost a frequency range for one and cut the same frequencies for the other. I normally knock a lot of the low end out of anything that's not a bass instrument/kick drum with an EQ or high pass just to make sure there's not any unnecessary clutter messing up my low end.

[kueller]

Well yeah I know that you have to get everything to fit nicely in different frequency areas but the more specifics of the either-r relationship with the kick drum/bass characteristics is something I never thought of in detail. It makes sense now that I do think of it though.

[Dominic.]

There's a cool freq analyst plug in from blue cat or something which shows the peaks of the whole freq spectrum or whatever. Handy

[haze015]

Raurie, I'm not talking about masking and all that, just the relationship between those two will have a drastic impact on the track as a whole, can even help define a band's sound, as well as genre as I've already talked about.

[Lexical_Whale]

Raurie, I'm not talking about masking and all that, just the relationship between those two will have a drastic impact on the track as a whole, can even help define a band's sound, as well as genre as I've already talked about.

 

Ah right I'm with you, fair enough .

 

In other news all this talk has led to me digging out the first mixes I ever did from college about 6 years or so ago. One of them is particularly horrific despite my thinking otherwise at the time:

 

If I remember rightly we recorded all the guitars (and probably bass) through a Line 6 Pod and are EQ'd to more or less boost everything evenly between 30 and 10k so they sound just as fantastic as you might imagine...

More embarrassingly it looks as though, for reasons unknown to man and science, I thought it was a good idea to clumsily gate the overheads and hi-hats. Guess how that worked out.

 

Doesn't help that the song is well over 6 minutes long, includes a piano interlude and a minute long instrumental outro where I clearly thought I was Slash (spoiler alert: I'm not).

[cheddatom]

I've been mixing my reggae/hip-hop band recently and I've found that as well as EQing to meld the kick and bass together, side-chaining is very useful too.