Recording Drums - Posted on 2013-07-17 by Taylor Reese

Today at the studio I recorded drums! Joey had a friend of his named Jim come on in and play. Though, before Jim came in Joey and I set up the microphones. We put two microphones and the stands for each overhead, one microphone for the kick drum, and one microphone and stand for the snare drum. Joey tested me on a few certain things that he taught me two years ago about micing up a drum set. One was to loosely wrap the cable around the microphone stands before clipping the microphone into the stand. That purpose is so there is no slack from the cables that would get in the way of the drummer. The other was placing the microphone for the snare drum. That microphone does want to get placed close to the drum, yet not in the way where the drummer could hit it. And next the microphone for the kick drum, which is placed inside close to where the kick would be hitting, yet not touching it because that would cause distortion. Then I hooked each cable into the input channels, and then created a new session in ProTools, and named each channel with the correct input. This is where I got to have fun, and learn more about the DAW and how to use that. I used the talkback button to speak with Jim to have him play around with the drums to get a feel for them, and also so that I could set the levels using the gain knob to make sure they are not too soft and not peaking, that they are just right. Two of the microphones needed phantom power, so I clicked in the +48V buttons on the DAW to turn on that phantom power, so we could receive the input from those microphones. The kick drum gain was turned down all the way, and it was still peaking. Thats when I learned about the Pan button. That softens the input, so then I could have the kick drum not peak, and turn the gain up just a little. After all was working, and the levels were set. I imported some songs for him to play with. We did three songs from the Beatles, one song from Ratatat, and one song from Placebo. Jim was very good, and he liked that I played some songs for him to play with, that he has never heard of...and he did a fabolous job, it was fun! After i recorded Jim each time, I would play it back for him, and with that I learned how to do that with the DAW and the different channels, and faders. Once we were finished I saved it all, and then cleaned up. We put the microphones away, wrapped up the cables (the correct way), and then saved the session to my flashdrive. Now, I will be working on it at home using Drumagog, which is a drum replacer. I have no idea how to use Drumagog, and I will mess around with it, but next lesson with Joey, he will teach me more in depth on how to use Drumagog. But it was a fun session, and Im glad that I was able to learn hands on and be there in the studio.