Drum Recording Session

I decided to seek the help of Cody Reynolds-Shaw, a sound engineering student,
for the drum recording session. This was because I felt his knowledge and experience would produce a better capture than mine alone. In addition, his house has a wonderful sounding room for rock drums and after hearing the recordings my friends had done there, I decided this would be a better choice than the drier, boxy university studios. We used fourteen microphones in total, some of which were dropped in the edit as they didn’t add anything to the desired effect. The track listing can be found below.

Sub Kick – DW The Moon

Kick Out – Shure Beta 52a

Kick Front – AKG C414 – Dropped as spill made kick less direct and impactful.

Snare Top – Shure Beta 57a

Snare Bottom – Sennheiser MD441U

Rack Tom – Sennheiser C451

Floor Tom – Audix D6

Hats – Røde NT5

OH L – Shure SM81

OH R – Shure SM81

Room L – Audio Technica AT4080

Room R – Audio Technica AT4080

Blumlein Room L – AKG C414 – Dropped as other room mics sounded better.

Blumlein Room R – AKG C414 – Dropped as other room mics sounded better.

Dio Davies was my drummer of choice as I had worked with him before and I thought he would have more time to learn the songs than my fellow third year students. I sent him the demos and briefed him on how I expected him to embellish the sequenced ideas with fills and his own variations.

Unfortunately, he had not learned the songs and so the session was quite slow and the edit was quite a task. Cody said he would be happy to edit and mix this for me but later decided he didn’t have the time. The stems he sent me for ‘Enough’ were partially edited tracks with plugins already applied before the bounce and so this made completing the edit and mix much more difficult. I also wasn’t able to utilise any quantisation as the nature of the gating he had applied made this a huge task that I didn’t feel was worth it. The snare mics were missing many of the ghost notes due to the threshold being set too high. Luckily, the overheads and room mics had picked these up well and so after some careful manipulation, the problem was solved. In future, I will make sure I attend all editing sessions to make sure I can stop these issues from occurring.

When mixing, I went for a mid to late 70’s progressive sound which left the kit quite dry, with only one pair of room mics used quite low in the mix. However, in ‘Pariah’ I wanted a powerful and driving sound from the floor tom rhythms in the vain of ‘Refuge’ by Steven Wilson. For this I added slightly more reverb and placed the floor tom spot mic more prominently in the mix.