http://soundcloud.com/cameron-heck/old- ... -recording

Geoff is always bugging me about processing, so I was sitting here thinking about doing it to a re-recording of a jam a few of you have already heard that my homie Landon and I busted out today. But I realized, what it is I am trying to do: I just really don't know how to go about doing. So EQ and compression-wise, what would you do given the sources and how they sound?

Glyns Johns setup on drums:
D112 in the kick and two MXL2001s.

990 on shitty little combo.

You don't always have to take Geoff's advice, dude's kind of a dick!

Anyway here's what I'd be doing: Try a lo pass on the guitar to lose some hair on the top. Does that sound better or worse? If you're in Reaper there's a pretty easier hi pass lo pass towards the end of the list, it's one of the JS ones, called HPF LPF or something like that.

Are the two condensers in phase? Solo the two of them and flip the phase on one, and if they are more or less in phase they should sound better before the flip.

Next time maybe mic the snare also, it could use some focus.

Put the two drum condensers in one folder and try some parallel compression on the folder. Again if you're in Reaper this can easily be done ... in Reacomp set it so you are squashing the piss out of them and they sound like shit. Then turn down the wet slider and up the dry slider until it sounds like something worth hearing again.

Try some compression on the kick, and some EQ. Google some suggested settings for that.

I second the snare mic thing in the future. Anything will do. The overall sound of the drums is good.

What are you looking for sonically? There's a fair bit of room on the guitars it sounds like; I don't know how much guitar bleed you're getting in the drum mics. That'll affect things. The guitars are nasty. For the style, nasty > smooth.

Also, are you planning on putting bass on here? 'Cause that'll completely change your compression and EQ decisions.

And the "fuck!" at the end is cool.

Sounds good. Lots of room sound on the drums. That colors a bunch, what things seem like.

A closer snare mic can help, but i would also perhaps aim to bring the GJ mics in a bit more closely.

Make sure that you are following the biggest rule of GJ style mics: Make sure that both capsules of the mics are the same distance from the center of the snare as each other. I usually just use a mic cable. Put one end at the overhead and let the cable drop down to the snare, hold it down on the snare center, then swing the mic end of the cable over to the floor tom side and put the side/overhead exactly where the end of it reaches. This will ensure that at least, your snare is in phase between the main mics. It actually sounds like it probably is on these recoardings, but if you don't already follow that technique for setting up Glyn Johns mics, you should.

Probably that is the thing i would change first though, making sure that i had some closer sounds. If you have the channels and extra mic(s), i would run a single or XY stereo room mics well off the drumset to pick up the gnar room sounds, but in general i find a little tighter setup is easier to work with when mixing comes around.

I also might futz with the kick a little. It sounds a bit dull, but not bad. If it sounds pretty much just like that in the room, and that is how you want it tuned to make playing comfortable, might experiment with EQing it. In a very general sense, i tend to cut the low lows, lightly boost the regular lows, scoop the middle slightly, and lightly boost the upper mids, while basically cutting almost anything above 10k out almost entirely. Sometimes i cut the high end even lower, it depends on the bass and guitar sound, and whether i am trying to mix a vocal in there too.

Post script: Also, your playing on this is good! Interesting beets and well beeted.

I would have used the snare mic, but I am short the stands to include both overheads and a snare. I was going to go mono and snare but you guys mentioning the Glyn Johns setup made me curious. And there's a fuckton of guitars in the overheads, but I figured that would be alright for the sake of what it is. I was going to use this as a live backing track to lay more geetarz over it and indeed get some bass shiz going. But I am thinking I might re-record it with closer overhead positioning. I was kinda thinking that they were sounding a little too room-y after we had recorded the thing but we said fuck it at the time, but I am changing my mind about that I think.. Might give it one more go, I think.

Whatever you do, it's a good start, and it's not as if you're pulling bad sounds here. The drums and the room sound good. The snare has a great crack! to it in the room.

Not my drumming, I am afraid. But I shall pass on the kind words.

Ah! I was wondering how you got there so fast.

I love parallel compression, so I would give this a shot.

If you like things loud, dirty and pumping it's a good trick. But, the best results for mixing in parallel compression is to wait until you have a decent mix to play with to get the appropriate amount of compressed loudness. I use the NY Parallel Bus or whatever method, or at least something similar to it. I send all of my drums to a Bus (or you can just send them all to one track in reaper and compress it) and put a heavy compressor on that with a quick attack and a pretty high ratio. I compress it to the point where it is overly pumpy and dirty loud, then take that and mix it with a the clean seperate drum tracks. If all goes well you have loud and dirty drums that are still clear and cutty.

As for everything else, I would listen to everyone else. They do this more often and better than me, but here are some of my usual bits. I like high passes on guitars to keep them out of cymbal territory and to get rid of high end fizziness or icepick-in-the-ear tones. Low passes are always nice on bass but sometimes I will add a little spike in the mids for grindiness and cuttyness (I know I eloquently wield tone jargon.) I usually use two tracks on each instrument with one side panning hard one way and softly the opposite (for example: one track 40-70% left and its duplicate 20-35% right.) Since you have a lot of room going on that is something you would have to play with.

this.

Yelling "fuck!" is definitely one of my finer skills.