HUGE ROCK DRUMS! No SAMPLES! ...this is how it works!

drums big fat sounding drums rock and roll that's what we're gonna talk about today i'm gonna show you how to mix some great sounding but also organic sounding drums and we're using a lot of very sexy ribbon microphones for that so that's gonna be a lot of fun i'm gonna show you how to make the same drum performance sound everything from titan in your face to roomy and huge and everything in between sounds like [Music] this [Music] but as i said the same drum performance can sound very different depending on how we mix it and by the way we're not using reverb here no digital reverb at all it's just the microphones mixed differently so that was a middle of the road example and now we're going from something very tight in your face to something very roomy enjoy [Music] before i walk you through the mix and cubase and show you how i get the sound for the different examples let me give you some background information about organic and good sounding drums how to record them i want to let you know what's important and what's not so there are mainly four different components that matter and we start right at the beginning of the signal chain so what's the first piece of that chain yeah that's the drummer and if you want to make your drum sound a lot better get a better drummer or let's say a better sounding drummer because it's not really about having someone who plays technically perfect not even about the timing the question is if a drummer sounds good or not if he makes the drum kit sing shine you know if he has the right balance or not when i record a drummer when i pull up the first fader mostly the overhead fader usually after 10 seconds i can i can tell how he will sound so yeah getting a good drummer is the easiest way to make your drum sound better but i know that's not always possible but you should be able to guide the drummer to give him the guidance he needs because sometimes that can really help him to sound better for example many of them are hitting the symbols too hard and the drums too softly and yeah you let them know what they are doing wrong some of them can actually adapt during the session or you might tell them to concentrate on hitting the snare right in the middle where it sounds great instead of doing the bing bang bang boom thing you know so if they know what they have to concentrate on they will play a lot better so that's the first thing anything that happens before the microphone if you improve that that is more effective than changing anything later today we have my dear friend thomas toefl on the drums he plays in a band called the alliator wine which is nothing but lovely check them out there's a link below the alligator wine vintage rock band amazing we're working on their second album right now the second thing is the drum kit and the drum kit is actually less important than you might think i've done a lot of great recordings with let's call them mid prized drum kits this one is really expensive though it's a yamaha maple custom i think they don't make it anymore but it used to be their most expensive drum kit and by the way i don't believe in the myth that you need to have birch birch kids for rock and roll we also have a yamaha what's it called recording custom like these standard for the studio a birch kit and i only use the kick but i don't use the rest really i prefer my maple kit so what's important first of all the most important part is the tuning i cannot explain the tuning in this video that will be a different video i have already done a snare tuning video here's a link watch it later but if you tune your drums right and if you have the right tuning for the genre you are playing that is so helpful and much more important than having a an expensive drum kit by the way if you choose a drum kit if you buy a drum kit same with the snare try to find something that sounds resonant compare different shells and try to find something that sounds resonant even in this kit here i'm using a 12 inch tom and it sounds great no matter how i tune it more or less it's the dimensions it's the wood i don't know it just sounds great i also have the 13 inch version from the same series and that one is way harder to tune and when it is tuned perfectly it also sounds great but i prefer the 12 inch version a lot more i'm pretty sure it's the dimensions so what you can take away is you can get a great drum sound also with cheaper gear if you yeah choose the right gear and if you know how to tune it will same with microphones we're not using super expensive microphones in this example and we're not using many microphones in this example so these days there are many many affordable drum microphones that sound great again if you have a good drummer and you have a well-tuned drum kit that works for this kind of music you will get away even with cheaper microphones i might do another video on cheap microphones anybody interested let me know thank you drummer drum kit microphones number four and that is very very important the room the room you're recording in and i have to tell you the more room the better your drum kit will sound more or less i mean you can get away with recording in a tiny room with a lot of absorption if you want to sample replace everything later anyway and add room samples and stuff like that yeah that works but if you want to have an organic roomy sound you need a good sounding room i'm not talking about a super professional measured room like mine people record drums in swimming pools you know that is not ideal but it sounds great a swimming pool has a lot of early reflections a swimming pool has a lot of flutter echoes a lot of higher frequencies not ideal but it sounds great on drums what i'm saying is if you have the chance to find a room that is bigger grab your laptop grab your recording gear and move there it will pay out in the end because you can play a lot with different distant microphones overheads and room microphones and it will give your recording more character than being in a tiny room rip off the absorbent material you know in so many rehearsals rooms i see carpets and everywhere that take away all the higher frequencies you want a room to breathe you want reflections that's what makes a drum session a drum recording interesting and one more thing that makes a good sounding room so precious and that is the more useful room or overhead microphone information you can record the less you need to rely on your clothes microphones the clothes mics are important they are important for the punch but they don't actually sound good most of the time they don't sound natural you don't have your ear two centimeters above a snare head no you don't have you don't do that closed microphones very often sound like so they have a lot of low end they have a lot of punch that is right but you to make them sound naturally you need to crank the highs you need to do a lot of eq um but we need to get close with the microphone to avoid the bleed from the other instruments so it's a compromise but it is the overhead microphones and the room microphones the distant microphones that give the drums its actual tone its body and in combination with the closed mics you have the punch of the closed mics and the actual tone of the drums coming from the distant microphones so again a good sounding room will give you more options more perspectives to capture the tone of your drum kit and of your drum performance and that's what i'm doing in this video i'm using ribbon mics for this why am i using ribbon mics i have three pairs of ribbon mics here i will go to my live room very soon and show you exactly where they are before we listen so why am i using ribbon microphones well they just work on drums for several reasons it's also a matter of taste so i don't like most of those small pencil condensers to me they sound a little too fast and a little too bright and a little too thin and a little too precise and a little annoying ribbon mics are more forgiving but fast enough still for drums ribbon mics traditionally have a full body sound that is slightly darker but modern ribbon mics that we are using here actually have enough of high end so it doesn't sound too vintage and ribbon mics have a certain quality that it just sounds very natural like you are in the room and that is a quality that is very important for recording drums so uh i finally i almost forgot that figure of eight patterns so they will also give you a lot of nice room information so ribbon mics sound natural they sound fat and punchy they don't sound too clinical and too precise that's why i love them on drums and here we have three stereo sets of ribbon mics one overhead setting one close room overhead whatever kit setting and one distant room setting let me go down to my live room and show you the setup welcome to my live room let's have a look at the microphone setup so let's start with the main overheads here's one and there's another one these are road ribbon microphones and you can see that like the main axis in between them goes here so i got the snare and more or less the kick in the middle in the stereo center and you see one symbol will be on this side the other symbol will be on that side one this tom will be on this side this tom will be on that side hi-hat over here so that means we will have a pretty good stereo image of the drums and being figure of 8 pattern ribbon microphones they will pick up quite a bit of the room but they are still pretty close to the kit so we should have a pretty balanced mix of the direct signal and the room so that's my main setup and then we can add the closed microphones so the next setup that's gonna sound a little more intimate and a little tighter is this one here and here i have a pair of no hype ribbons and they are quite a bit closer but you can see they're more or less in the same in the same axis like cymbals left right tom's left right kick and snare in the middle because they are closer they will sound tighter but also because they are above the kick drum and in this position the kick drum is not going to have a lot of bass here it's going to sound tight and a little thin maybe but you know that's what we want same thing for the snare because they're facing the side of the snare which means uh from the side of the snare there's not a lot of low end coming it's more like the the the highs that are coming from the shell so this one's gonna sound thinner and tighter but yeah you know we want some alternatives we want some different perspectives and let's have a look at the other microphones um so here you can see i also had a lo-fi microphone here and a kick microphone there and we find the first gobo we have my second kick microphone this is an sc electronics rnt tube microphone here's the ludwig snare that we also used on this recording excuse the mess this is yeah looks terrible right now okay and behind the second gobo you know drums over here we have my third pair of ribbon microphones and this is a pair of sc electronic voodoos also great sounding they're actually the brightest of the bunch anyway they are in a bloom line setup and they're behind the gobo so they're not gonna pick up a lot of direct signal but they will pick up a lot more bouncing back from everywhere in the room so they're gonna sound darker they're gonna sound more distant more roomy and will give us a very very different view perspective picture of the drum kit alright so we got this one this is the room setup and we've got two setups here the main overheads now you can see them from this side and let's call them the tight overheads let's see what we can do with them we're back in the control room let's have a look at the tracks so here you can see my three stereo tracks the three stereo ribbon pairs the red one that is the normal overhead setup here we have the room far room and here we have the more intimate sounding the closer microphones the idea is to combine each of those stereo files with the closed microphones kick snare toms to achieve three different drum sounds here from the same performance we start with the normal overheads no processing by the way at all so on any of the tracks and sounds like this [Music] so that just sounds very good and very balanced why is that first of all we're using the rode ribbon microphones and they are like the modern type of ribbon microphones so they have all the advantages of ribbons they sound full and natural but they have an extended top so they will just sound a little more modern they they will give you a little more modern image especially of the symbols but will also have a little more attack a little more snap in the drums that sounds very nice i've shown you the position so that is very important i had this axis so i made sure by having each microphone on one side of that axis that every drum and every symbol is where i want it in the stereo image i made sure the snare has the same distance to each microphone same for the kick more or less it's not that important to have the kick in the middle on your overheads if you use a closed kick mic and i have fine-tuned the height of the of the microphones to get the right balance between the room and the direct signal that sounds very nice here you can hear the room but it's not too much it's still very detailed you can hear the character of the symbols and the drums but you can hear hey it's happening in a nice room and by moving the microphones you can fine tune the balance between the different instruments so i usually fine tune them until i think i have found a good overhead balance where i can hear the whole kid in favor of the symbols so let me add the closed microphones let me show you what they sound like so this is our snare very nice sounding snare really ringy and open sounding really nice and it has enough punch because that's the function like i told you of the closed mics to give us not a natural sound but the punch the low end of the snare or of any drum let's have a listen to the kick drum sounds like this [Music] i think i have yeah here i have an eq like carving out a little 300 hertz let's just turn it off not really doing a lot so snare is completely unprocessed let's uh start with the overheads and then we will add the closed mics [Music] and that sounds wonderful right because we made no mistakes so far you know drummer is good drum kit sounds nice it's tuned well enough we use the right microphones in a good sounding room so uh there's not a lot of character in this version right now but it just sounds clean and nice and you can now continue with recording other instruments and later typically you need to carve out some lower mids to make some to make some space for the other instruments and to take out some energy down there maybe add some highs to those tracks so uh the drums get a little more bite and a little more snap but for now this just sounds great maybe let's just add the toms as well if you do your homework you don't need a lot of processing let's move on to the next pair let's turn off the close mics again let's have a listen to the room track sounds like this [Music] also very nice i mean more roomy of course and less detailed i can hear something around 3k that sounds a little annoying let me just take that out [Music] so you can hear this sounds a lot more roomy you have less details and you have less or actually no real useful stereo information anymore let's have a listen [Music] i'm a stereo room guy i don't like mono room mics i just don't like them i know other people love them i just don't like them they kind of sound a little unnatural to me and you know one argument is if you record room in stereo you can still turn into a mono you have two mono mics you know but you can't do it the other way around i prefer if i can to use a stereo setup okay so what do we need to do here if this is our only microphone we need compression why do we need compression first of all because compression makes drums and especially room tracks sound very sexy that's one thing the other thing is it will bring up all the details that might be a little covered or a little cloudy so let's use some compression and i want to use the most extreme compression out there i'm using the talkback limiter from corenef which is a plug-in version of the famous ssl listen mic compressor which is one of the most extreme compressors out there you don't have to do much you just you know just crank it a little [Music] i always want to make sure like the needle goes back to zero on the silent hits [Music] 20 db of compression okay that sounds great but too much like an effect so i will mix in let's say 50 percent of the dry [Music] signal so that gives the room track a lot more mojo but it doesn't sound like an effect and it brings up all the let's call it background information so to say [Music] what i'm using here these are the se electronics voodoo ribbons i think they're the cheapest of the bunch really great sounding they're they're pretty pretty cheap i don't know i'll put a link to all the microphones in the description uh the passive ones i don't need the active ones for what drums are loud enough anyway i can recommend those because they're pretty cheap and they sound great and they're actually the brightest of the bunch so they have highs like almost like like like a darker sounding condenser so they're very useful i also use them as overheads all the time and i use them here behind the gobo because they bring back some of the highs that are gone because the microphones are far away all right let's do the same thing again let's add the closed mics [Music] and that just makes me happy again one stereo pair of ribbons and then you have the clothes mics and that's it and this sounds great [Music] you can hear all the details and it has a lot of punch and still it sounds roomy and has character has a story to tell so let's compare this to the version we had before to the overheads version room first [Music] so very different right so different same performance totally different perspective but equally cool let's go back [Music] just imagine having one of one sound in the verse and then opening up the chorus by adding the room microphones you can also mix them of course that just makes things sound interesting and it's so simple you see it's so simple now we have two options now it depends on the arrangement and how we want the song to sound but let's talk about the third option we have maybe we want the arrangement to be a little more intimate and this is where the you know the two mics in front of the kick come into play and they sound like this [Music] so they sound intimate a lot more mono you have a lot more highs and you have a lot more details but you don't have the boom of the other microphones because they're so close i think they sound a little bright so let me just eq them a little bit to make them sound a little smoother [Music] so i'm removing the highest highs here i don't like them and this symbol sounds a little annoying i was i showed you down there right better like this maybe at a low cut [Music] now that's a lot nicer you know it's not much but i'm adding a little boom down there taking out the lowest rumble uh checking out some boxiness here and trying to make the symbol sound a lot less aggressive here and also removing the highest highs [Music] it might be an option to add soothe here one of the greatest plug-in invention of the last years so [Music] [Music] this is removing all the nasty resonances up there so it just makes things sound a little smoother again now i like this [Music] i don't want compression here because it will bring up too much of the room i want this to be as close sounding as possible um one thing i want to do is i want to make this more mono to stereo let's go to let's say 80 percent more or less let's go [Music] that's tight and bright like very different from the other two i like it so let's add the clothes mics and i think we will need less of the gloss mics because i can already hear the drums pretty well i don't think we need the toms at all because listen tom sounds great just on those ribbon tracks let's add the kick [Music] and the snare [Music] awesome awesome i love this so nice so you see i'm switching just between those three stereo pairs without any fine tuning of the close mics and you can see yeah i'm painting three pictures beautiful pictures from close to roomy to something in between let's have another lesson [Music] all right that's all i want to show you today so i've told you about those four steps make sure you have a good sounding drummer that really helps you can hear it here make sure you have a good sounding drum kit doesn't have to be super expensive but it should be well tuned and the tuning should be right for whatever style you are playing make sure you have an interesting sounding room doesn't need to be a professional room but it should be an interesting sounding room nothing boring and the first thing that that was before make sure you have some good sounding mics but again you see it here all those ribbon mics are not very expensive and the rest are just some dynamic mics i'll put a list of all the microphones used in the description but you can see uh a stereo pair of sc electronic ribbons is not expensive then you add two dynamic mics for your kick in your snare and maybe two more for your toms and that's it the next thing you want to do you want to experiment with the room i know my room pretty well i've done a lot of sessions in there so i know where to put the room microphones i know where to put them i still need to experiment a little but most of the time i'm damn close so you want to experiment and you might find some weird positions in your room that sound great or you might just find some positions that are very different from mine but work great in your room do some experiments and once you know your room well enough you can have a setup like this where you have three drum sounds and you can switch between them with just one click fun right really cool boys and girls are you interested in getting those drum tracks you know just to have some fun with them just to experiment with them just to you know whatever i will send you those drum tracks the multitracks next week all you have to do is subscribe to my email list you'll find a link below please subscribe i will send you the drum tracks and you can have a lot of fun with them all right that's one thing i will also put a lot of links below to all the gear that i used in this example i will put a link to the alligator wine a great vintage rock band by the way they have no guitars it's just two guys drums they're both singing and a moog bass and a distorted organ very interesting music check out the alligator wine uh what else yeah check out my socials you will find them here just have a look at the description there's a lot of cool stuff there i will also put some discounts there uh you can get my drum samples there you can get my ir packs there all the stuff that will make you happy um please share this video share it on facebook share it elsewhere uh tell your friends and grandma uh that this channel exists ring the bell ding dong so you don't miss any videos now i've said everything all the stupid stuff you have to say at the end of a video right i think so i love you all i see you in hell bye bye so [Music] you

Channel: Kohlekeller Studio

Views: 19,925

Keywords: drums, kristian kohle, urm academy, produce like a pro, snare, kick drum, metal drums, tuning drums, recording drums, mixing drums, editing drums, drum mics, ribbon mics, room mics, drum microphones, tom tom, toms, drum EQ, heavy metal drummer, blastbeat, drum trigger, drum samples, drum library, vintage drums, ludwig, audix, dw, yamaha drums, maple custom, 1176, api drums, metal drumming, rock drums, bomham drums, roomy drums, cymbals, overheads, royer, coles

Id: qPVw2_XY7Fc

Length: 33min 35sec (2015 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021