Masters Program - Lesson 5 - Posted on 2015-02-23 by Collin McCombs

Lesson 5 was about the basics of a tracking session. On day one I met with my mentor to go over the lesson. We started out by discussing the common structure of a song. It all starts with drums then goes on the bass, guitars, keyboards, and vocals. For this session we focused on drums and bass because the guitar player in the band I am working with is also the bassist. The first thing we talked about was getting good drum sounds. Where you set up the drum kit is important because every spot will have a different sound. For the first song I decided to put the drums on the wider side of the live room to get a bigger sound. Next we talked about tuning the drums. Aaron started out by telling me the way to get the best drum sounds possible is with new heads. Once the new heads are on you can begin tuning the drums until the optimum resonance is achieved. After the drums are set up and tuned you can then set up microphones and choose the disired placement. Microphones and placement are another key element to getting good sounds. The drum set up on the first song was a standard drum kit consisting of a kick, snare, hi-hat, three toms, and to cymbals. Since this was my first time tracking drums Aaron wanted to keep the mic selection simple but effective. We decided to use a Beta 52 on the kick, a Shure SM57 on the snare, Sennheiser 421s on the toms, and Neumann KM 184’s for the overheads. The key to a good drum sound is to make sure all the mics are in phase. Next I put the bass cab in an isolation booth and miked it  with a RE20 dynamic mic. Once all the mics are set up its time to get all the signals into the board. This is done by setting the Input Section on the channel strip to "MIC" so that the signals are going through the preamps. After that you need to hit the direct and float buttons to get the signal in the board and floated from the rest of the signals. Once this is done you can set up the Pro Tools session and start patching in all your signals. Also make sure that the headphones are up and running so all the musicians are as comfortable as possible. When all this is done you can then set the tempo and begin tracking. On day two once everything was set up we ran through the song a couple times so I could dial in the levels on the drum kit and bass cab, and it also gives the musicians a chance to warm up. The rest of the takes we kept for editing. I feel like the session went pretty smooth and it was great to make connections with the band “Buyer Beware”.

- Collin McCombs