I played around a bit with those drum tracks through my headphones in Logic… The 58 on the floor tom has to go. It’s picking up a weird resonance form the bass drum. When the floor tom is hit it sounds OK, but the rest of the kit ambient sound does not sound good through the 58.
As Ron suggested I think we will try our tiny condenser pencil mics on the toms, hopefully that will give a more focused detailed sound. I have always preferred condenser mics to dynamics for just about anything anyway. That would free up some 57s to put on the guitar cabs, and maybe even a 57 to mic the bottom of the snare for extra sizzle.
The 57 on the rack tom sounded fine, but I still think I would like to retune those toms. The bottom heads are off enough to cause some ugly dissonance.
Also we need to balance out the overheads. When I sat down at the kit tonight I saw that the overhead- drummer right – was out of place – damn cheap stands move too easy. Don’t know if that happened before or after the test recording, but if it was before, that explains what I hear.
I think it would be wise to try to work on this a bit more, perhaps just Ron and I can experiment and Dave can fine tune the next time he is here. I know we can do better than what we got, although it wasn’t bad at all.
One thing about headphones is I can hear these subtle details like a mic out of place, but they sure don’t move air like a real speaker – the bass drum doesn’t slam you with headphones like a monitor does – so now I see why both are important.
Joe