Posts Tagged ‘EQ’

Thursday June 18 – an email I sent to some of the guys:

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

This is my quick and dirty rough mix in Logic – nothing Final.

I used all mics in the mix except the TOM mics, but I would like to use them in the final mix if we can fine tune the mic placement. The tom mics actually do add some nice attack and presence when they are hit.

This is fun! My first time mixing more than 2 tracks for drums since I only own a 2 Ch interface.

I used a little compression and EQ on each track, and a touch of reverb on the sanre track and panned it left a hair. Also ran a drumeset compression on the bus mix.

I think drums can be the biggest challenge in getting to sound good, especially vintage kits from the early 60s. They have their quirks, but they also had mad character!

Sound file:

Click here to hear the recording from this session.

Tuesday June 16 – Day 1 – Drum Set up and Test:

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Ron and drummer, Dave met at my house so we could set up. We moved my 60s Gretsch drumset out of the way (too jazzy sounding with the heads I have on right now) to make room for the kit we will be using for the recording – a vintage 60s Pearl kit that sounds great. We’ll be using the hardware and cymbals from my drum kit as well as one of my vintage Ludwig snares – a 1967 Supraphonic. I read somewhere that that is the most recorded snare drum in history. That seems appropriate for this project – plus one for the statistics.

Dave set up the drums and tuned the heads while Ron was setting the recording rig up. Meanwhile I set up the mic stands, chose the mics used, and ran the mic cables to the Mackie. Then we took a dinner break before going back into my home studio and continued with some testing.


The mics we ended up using were small diaphragm condensers as overheads set up in a stereo A/B configuration. We close miced the snare and toms with Shure Sm 57s and an SM 58 on the floor tom, since we were out of 57s to work with at that point. We put an Audio Technica 4033 on the bass drum, since we didn’t have a proper Bass drum mic. I wasn’t sure how that was going to turn out, but to my surprise that mic sounded great on the bass drum. We can EQ that to taste later in the mix.

Some photos of the set up: (pardon the blurry photos. I tried to get some photos without flash to capture the ambience and all I had at the time is my wife’s point and shoot camera).