How to add character to your DRUMSOUND!

hey there everybody today i want to talk about room microphones on drums because that is so much fun so if you're not using room microphones yet when you're recording drums you should start doing that now because they will give you the character and spice that your drums need and they will make your drum sound special i believe you don't even need a huge room a normal let's say classroom sized room is enough just make sure it's empty you know people like two mats and use the swimming pool to record drums what you want is reflections you want something going on so the drums don't sound boring find a room make sure it's empty start throwing mics into that room start finding out where they sound cool and start adding character to your drums i have just done a very cool drum session with lagrimas profunda for the next album they sound like this [Music] and here you can see their drummer dominic playing our groove of the day i actually set up two stereo pairs of room mics i want to show you how you can treat them the kick is midi by the way so it's not important for this example the rest is untouched just the raw signals overheads two snare mics three toms and right now our room mics are bypassed so let's start with this one this is my distant pair of room mics this is where i put it as far away from the drums as possible and what i want is a rather washy sound that make the drum sound distant because i want to compress it i want to distort it and yeah add character it's not about sounding nice and i know that my room gets more and more washy the higher you get with the microphone so i use that effect to get an over the top low-fi room effect let me show you how i do this [Music] so you see it sounds quite distant there's not a lot of low end information because it's quite far away but it already has a little low-fi touch if you ask me so what we want is compression we want compression total compression there are three or four different extreme compressors that i use for this today i want to use devil lock deluxe from sound toys let's see what we can do [Music] i will use some compression a little distortion slightly darken it and bring back the original [Music] i should have tuned the tom that floor tom you can hear now yeah that could be enough so let's mute that microphone once again and mix it in [Music] and immediately you get that over-the-top super compressed uh room sound right now we are just hearing uh toms let me just play another riff or another beat for you with symbols okay so here the symbols are a little annoying so let's add an eq remove some low end and also try removing some high end you need less high end on room tracks than you might expect because if you cut the highs like i do now it reduces the symbols but the shells don't change that much [Music] this is better let's hear it in the mix again very nice little lo-fi a little vintage in a way i like it but let's do something else because i have another pair here um this one you can see it here it's a lot closer to the drums and it's in a bloom line setup those are ribbon mics road ruin mics let's have a listen how this sounds [Music] you can hear that there's a lot more low-end information because those mics are a lot closer uh they're also in the part of the of my room where there's more diffusion and that kind of helps to spread the loads and finally those mics sound massive and huge so let's use that with these microphones i don't want to try to make them sound washy and distant and over the top compressed i want the opposite i want them to support my shells and give the shells more weight more body more base let's do that i'm going to use fabfilter pro mb this one here this is a dynamic eq and what i want is i want to push the bass frequencies like the fundamentals of the thompson of the snare that's what i want but i want to do it dynamically so each time the drummer hits the toms or the snares i want pro and b to boost that range let's see if that works [Music] talking about this range we have to go to expand because we want to boost it attack release fast ratio full power expand so now um each time the level exceeds the threshold it should boost um this frequency let's go for a healthy 10 db good let's fine-tune this with another beat so it's only reacting to the snare on the top it's very nice now let's get rid of some high end one more time and we can simply add another band here and we don't need this to be dynamic just a normally q band and just solo it and see how much we can take out this way we can remove the highs so this plugin supports the character that is already there you know and i want this to sound like uh like like a early reflection reverb that pushes the lows all right let's mix this one in turn off the other room mics and you can see this also sounds great but it's a totally different effect done with room mics again this adds body and the other one let's unmute the other one that's spice i think i want these ones to be a little more stereo let's add a stereo enhancer [Music] so here you can see it a lot more washy but a really dramatic effect and the other track is only pushing the snare making it sound more natural and bigger almost like a short early reflection reverb with a lot of bass all right let's check out both room mics together and i will bypass them so you can see what we have achieved all right you see it's fun to play around with room mics right find a cool room doesn't need to be a professional room find a few cool mics for the first one for the distant version you can use 257's you can use some cheap mics dynamics or some cheap condensers just make sure they don't sound too bright you don't want bright microphones there and for that close thing i prefer ribbons but you should also find mics that have like an extended or nice natural low end it's fun to work with this it's fun to automate this for different parts of the song and yeah this way you can come up with your own drum sound instead of just relying on samples and other people's work so i hope this was inspiring to you start working with room mics it's fun see you held bye-bye

Channel: Kohlekeller Studio

Views: 21,548

Keywords: drums, metal drums, recording drums, mixing drums, kristian kohle, room microphones, roomy drums, john bomham drums, aea, coles microphones, nail the mix, urm academy, drumsession, kick drum, snare drum, how to record drums, how to mix drums, natural drums, triggering drums, drumtrigger

Id: QZ3jhBVWP9o

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020