Drum Kit Pics - For Funsies

Moving On

Matthew and I chose "Move On" to dive into with the recording process (and with the gorgeous mics). It will be one of the more complicated songs because it has two sections that we will record separately, but will need to keep some continuity between them. This is also a good chance for me to try out different drum mic setups.

Here's what Matthew recorded to the click track for the first section...



Here is my first good take with the two UMT 70 S in a stereo pair over the drum set. The floor tom was recorded separately.



The clip is louder because I was trying to bring the snare and bass forward through EQ. After quite a bit of tinkering, I just felt this was not as "live" a drum sound as I wanted. It also didn't have enough capture of the bass drum.

I did a little playing around, and chose to go with one mic about three feet over the kit pointed at the snare, and one mic about four feet in front of the kit pointed at the top of the bass drum. Like so...



I tried this setup with one of the KM-88s in the position over the set, thinking they would be good overhead mics. It didn't seem to capture enough of the body of the sound. If I had lots of inputs, I probably would have used them as overheads while close miking the kit as well. But limited to two inputs, the best combo seemed to be the UMT 70 S in each position. This gave me more of what I was looking for...



And with Matthew's scratch. Not much done in terms of mixing/producing.

Unexpected Gift

As we started this process, we spoke with anyone we know who has experience with recording. One of these people is a friend from our House Church who records professionally, including orchestras. When we asked him for advice he said, among other things, "Give me a call sometime and I'll let you borrow my microphones."

Awesome. I gave him a call. Here's what we get to borrow...

A pair of Microtech Gefell UMT 70 S


A pair of Neumann KM-88i


A pair of Milab DC-63


A pair of Neumann KMi with different capsules


These mics are amazing. Getting to work with them is a real treat. It may seem obvious, but the real benefit of these microphones is how they reproduce exactly what's happening. The downside of this is that you need to make sure your performance, the instrument, and the room are sounding exactly the way you want.

We have been using the mics to experiment with the song "Move On". The next post will have some examples.

Putting it Together

Matthew and I gave our process a trial run this week, recording guitar, vocals and drums on "New York in Winter".

Step 1: Dial in a metronome in the room to the right tempo
Step 2: Record Matthew playing along to the metronome (scratch)
Step 3: Record Matthew singing along to the guitar track (scratch)
Step 4: Record Zach playing along to the guitar and vocals. This would be the first track to keep.

This is how far we made it. Here's the guitar by itself...



And here's everything else with it. It's a long way from perfect. I need some mixing lessons.



After this, we would record actual tracks of guitar and vocals over the drums. I'm not sure if this process is overly complicated or not. We could probably remove a couple of the steps. Right now we just want to get comfortable with the whole process.

Here's Matthew, stepping up.



Oh, and here's Ben. Helping.

An interface

The key to being able to do a recording ourselves is to be able to actually record wherever we want. We needed a way of connecting mics to a laptop. I started looking into audio interfaces, which is a more confusing world than I would have thought.

Technology for home recording has taken some amazing leaps in recent years. I won't feign expertise by posting a bunch of specs and opinions. Instead I'll tell you the trade-offs I was balancing.

• Cost
• Quality of recording (s/n ratio, sample rate, bit depth)
• Preamps (needed phantom power)
• Number of XLR inputs
• Connection (USB, Firewire)
• User reviews

After a few days of intense internet research, I went with the Cakewalk (previously Edirol) UA-25EX. I chose it for it's apparent quality and consistently good reviews. It should allow us to record anything (guitar, vocals, electric guitar, organ) with relative ease. The downside is that it only has 2 inputs, which limits us from a drumset perspective. However, I've been reading up on recording drums with 2 mics and think the sound will work for us. I will post results from those tests later.

Here's a pic of the interface hooked up...

A microphone

An outstanding bass player and audio technician I know once told me that the biggest reason you pay for a studio is their microphones. They have other great expensive equipment and isolation booths and cheap beer, but microphones are at the top of the list for differentiators.

This is why getting a decent microphone was at the top of my list for our project. I was looking for a general purpose condenser mic. There are many players in the field so I decided to let Craigslist choose for me. There was an AKG Perception 200 for $100, second-hand but new condition. I'm pretty sure it was a drug house I bought it from, given the level of security, but regardless it seems it was a good deal.

Here it is, now in my possession.



Matthew and I did some testing at the church with that mixing board. Here's a sample of the audio quality. This is from a new song, which might be titled "It's different when you're gone".



This was a very encouraging mic test.

The appeal

Recording ourselves is attractive for a few reasons.

1. We have time
2. We don't have money
3. We have a vision

That last one is important, and frustrating. We know how we want our music to sound, but can't completely describe it. It's live, energetic, full (for two people). This is easy to hear in a practice room, but difficult to capture.

And that's where reasons one and two come in. Doing it ourselves allows us to experiment without paying for someone else's time.