Some time ago I did a few practicing recordings with my band. The leftovers took up space on the harddisk, so I wanted to delete them, but not without scrolling through the sessions. Some drum tracks got my attention (we recorded them only to check the sound) and I was pleasantly surprised when I put a little EQ, some room and a compressor on them.
I am nowhere near an expert when it comes to recording stuff, so maybe I was just lucky (we miked the drum kit with some really cheap mikes - the only exception being a SM 57 for the snare - and ran it all into a 16 channel mixer from where I took the stereo out into ardour).
To make a long story short: I ended up cutting drum loops and just played a little with them at home and made a backing track for playing guitar solos.
Equipment:
Ardour (obviously) on an iBook
Really cheap mikes (maybe obviously)
Fake bass made with the pitch shifter from a TC G-Major (which is slow, so the timing is far from accurate)
Marshall JMP-1 with Speaker Simulator Out
My Les Paul
The drum tone is great, but the fill at the end of the loop is way out of time, but you easily fix that. Also, the guitar is a bit loud.
Let me rephrase - the drum tone is FANTASTIC. What type of drums, heads, cymbals, etc? What cheap mics and where were they placed? Price and brand name mean nothing, just sound!
Thank you for the reply. I’m glad that you like the sound of the drums - I think they were the hardest to record.
I really don’t know what mics we used, our drummer bought a set of cheap drum mics (made in China) for ca. 100 Euros from Thomann, I think. But I am really not sure, I will have to ask him. He uses a Mapex drumset with five toms and one bassdrum – I will ask for the specs and post them soon. The lowest tom had one mic on its own, the other four shared two mics. The snare had the SM 57, ca. 5 cm above the rim pointing towards the middle (and it was loud like hell, that’s why the most of the snare drum sound is from the two overhead mics I think). I think the mics where not really close to the drums, at a 40° - 45° angle.
We are really no experts placing drum mics, so we tried everything out. That’s also why I can’t tell exactly what we have done there.
Apart from that, we only had our mixer with the EQ (parametric mids) and recorded the mixed signal in stereo with Ardour. No gates, compressors or anything else in the chain.
Thank you for the comment. This was never intended to be a proper song but just a vehicle to see if the drum samples could fit in with other instruments.
Unfortunately I can’t sing – or: I can hold a note, but I have no good singing voice. Good enough for background vocals but not for anything else.
But if someone wants to play around with what I have, I gladly provide my ardour session.
Nice sound. Sometimes when you just go for it a song comes out pretty good and very original sometimes. Some songs sound good unrefined, this gives the song a more organic feel to it. Are you planning on putting some vocals to this rough draft(WIP)?