Thoughts/questions/opinions on what I've got going on here...?

Tomorrow afternoon (today) I'm going to record rough stuff and work out all the fine shit before I start doing the tracks...

There's a brand new Powerstroke III on the kick drum. Sounds... familiar. I like familiar classic sort of sounds.

Mics are a CAD drum mic kit, but for the snare I put my i5 above and a 57 below...

That should work for what you guys do i think.

Though, you may find that you are getting an awful lot of hi-hat in the overhead.

Ideally, you would want the cymbals a bit higher than that, also, but you can also get decent results with them that close to the toms. Might make compressing and gating the toms difficult though.

Also, you might want to record a bit, and then move the snare mics around, and record a bit more. Lately, i have my snare top much like you have yours(though a bit higher and pointing down into the snare a bit more), but i actually have my snare bottom pointing up into the bottom head, aimed as much as possible away from the hi-hats.

The main thing, IMO, is to do it a couple different ways and then go with whatever is working the best for what you are recording.

The other main thing is to try to keep the snare and hi-hat as separate as possible.

Lastly, you will have to see if having the kick mic that far in works well for you. You may find that it catches a lot of cymbal bleed through the drumhead. Or. If you kick pretty hard, you may find that having it that close might make it easier to gate cymbal bleed out with.

But really, record a little, change a little, record a little more, listen back. I don't know what kind of time schedule you are on, but i like to set up my drum sounds over a couple of days. Mainly because i am doing it myself, and my ears get tired from playing, and i can't always hear clearly, what i have recorded, until the next day.

The drumsounds are something that you can figure out without anybody else around though. I actually find it easier to do without the guitar player or bassist around, because there is that tedious element of re-doing things to get the better sound, and they often just get bored. Which tends to become contagious, and then i get bored with it too.

The overheads... I've used this set of mics before (GraveGravy) and we found that the only way to get the desired stereo spread was to have them right in there. It's funny, but it sounded fine.

The mics are all going to get moved around though. As you suggested, I'm going to be recording a little, adjusting, comparing, repeat all afternoon. Hopefully I can get it all done in the one afternoon though.

I want a really natural sound so my first criteria will be to get the overheads right. With the exception of the kick drum I want the overheads to be the bulk of the sound, with the closemics just beefing it up and putting their respective drums more up front.

EDIT:

You were right about the OHs. It must have been the room we were in last time. I've moved them up a bunch and it is much better. The positioning of the kit is not so great though... there is a wall quite close on the high hat side, and plenty of open space on the ride side. So you can hear the ride bouncing off the wall in opposite overhead. It's all on a riser that is only big enough for the kit to sit in this position. Hm... maybe if I put something mushy against that wall...

I was expecting to have to cut out all the tom tracks where toms aren't actually being played (I usually do this) but I actually like how it sounds with the tom mics running all the time.

Snare mics sound pretty close to how I'd like them, though the kick drum is bleeding into the bottom mic a bit too much. Must see about that...

These are the sounds I've got so far:

http://maplifiers.net/dload/file.php?id=26

Kick is part mic, part trigger via SD2.0...

I was going to use Drumagog but the shareware has expired. So I ended up using some JS/MIDI plugins that came with Reaper, to feed SD2.0.

Excuse the playing though. That is one thing that will hopefully turn out a lot better when I record the songs.

Thoughts?

Sounds pretty good, though you might want to tighten the snare strainer slightly. Or if it is tight but has frayed or bent wires hanging off, try to cut them off with a pair of pliers. Once you get to blasty beats you are going to want to minimize the rattle aspect of those suckers as much as possible so you can crank that mic without over-accentuating its "bottom head"-ness in the mix.

I also suspect that the hi-hat might give you worry, but it will be harder to tell that for sure until there are geetars and bass all up in that. If you had one more channel, you might consider putting one mic just on the hi-hat, in a manner that minimized bleed from any other element of the kit, so that you could have it later, in case you needed to reverse the phase on it and use it as a hi-hat bleed remover... Not worth sacrificing another channel for, but if you had a free one, it might be something to mess with.

Basically, when you get the geetars and drums on there, you may find that you are going to want a lot more kick, a lot more snare, and probably a lot less cymbal. You might try just quicky scratchtracking some geetar and bass on there to see if it is going to work for you. It might.

As a "natural" sound, i think it works pretty well. But i think that for metal, maybe the cymbals are a bit high in the mix versus the kick and snare.

That is a pretty ingenius way to deal with the hi hat. I don't have enough channels on my interface though... they are all taken. I don't think I'll mind if the hi hat is a little loud, but we'll just have to see later.

I like what my snare wires are doing though. I want it to sound a little ragged.

What is pissing me off the most is the hi hat side overhead. The ride one sounds great, probably because there is a great deal of open space and some sound is bouncing off the wall near the hat. The hi hat one sounds very much only in the right speaker with nothing veering towards the centre. Right now I have the high hat one 75% right and the ride one 100% left. I guess I should experiment with more positioning...

No comments on the computer screen content?

It was a 72 minute pornographic instructional on the G-spot.

Just looks like brightly colored squares from here.

On a tangent, now i totally want to become a sex ed teacher and utterly confuse the young'ns.

"And that, children, is how copulation works. Brightly colored squares. Class dissmissed."

damn... I did not pickup on that.

flogging time.

This are my drum recording journalz.

Process is a little frustrating but we are making progress. I have introduced parallel compression into the mix, for the toms and overheads (the rest is already compressed to fuck), and ditched the trigger because it was too much of a fucking headache. Instead I just EQed the kick harder and put a transient shaper on it... now it sounds kind of like this:



I always thought the kick sound on this album was lulzy, so keen of me to end up recording it.

I track daon, five to go.

http://maplifiers.net/dload/file.php?id=27

Thoughts?

You can really hear the shortcomings of my faulty double bass technique. Blast came out tight as a nun, though.

2 tracks down, that will do for today...

Sounds like your kick mic is out of phase maybe?

Also, midi scratchtrax is lulzy. You should totally do a Konami Mix of the final.

Hmm, nope. It sounds like that if I solo it.

It's just a funny tone. Removing more low mids might normalify it, but for now I am fond of this sound. It's like knuckles cracking, or some other meat based sound. We'll see what ends up in the final mix...

I like the kick sound.

IMO, the under-snare mic is a bit prominent if you're going for "natural", but I know you're fond of the thing, and I'm not hearing it in the context of a mix with big chuggy guitars either. Good job. I kinda want to nitpick about the toms but I'm not sure what, really, 'cause I'm not hearing it in context. They seem primarily attack, but again, metal mix, the decay of the thing isn't really gonna come through.