The Bullet mic thing rules. The more distant ambient mics are cool as well- only the close room is enabled when you first bring up SD2.
On a similar note, go to SSL's web site and download the Listen Mic Compressor plugin. It's free, and is cool on a parallel drum bus. (Parallel compression is
on drums- you get the beef and the shell resonance and still get all the punch.) It's the old Phil Collins thing, basically- he took a mono overhead and slammed it through the compressor for the talkback mic on an old SSL desk. The compressor sounds like shit because it was purely something to bring the level up for the guys in the tracking room to hear the engineer behind the desk. It's filthy and rules on drums. Also, similar to the 1176 All Buttons In room thing.Fucking up the drums and blending it in to a normal sound kicks ass, even for normal rocksounds. It's surprising, if you listen back on a good system, how overdriven kicks and snares often are. Snares especially. Snares love overdrive. If you have the first Audioslave record (the good one
) kicking around, put that on and listen to how dirty those drums are. (And how overdriven Chris Cornell's vocal is most of the time. Not the subtle, occasional dirt of Superunknown [which is, IMO, one of the definitive rock vocal productions ever] by any means) It's an obvious modern example (and a good production- the bass tones on that rule!) which is why I bring it up, but this stuff is all over the place. Clean is overrated.
for ease of mixing/doing it on the cheap. And I'm finding I have a difficult-er time getting SD2 to sit in the mix than I'd like. It sounds thin and less punchy compared to even the unprocessed real kick/snare/overhead tracks I used as reference. It always seems to sit easily with Pods, DI bass and softsynths with not much done to it. Putting it up against miced guitar and bass and analog hardware synths it's having a harder time.
