re drum sounds

What kind of sound are you trying to get? The snare and toms sound fine and the cymbals seem a little loud but the kick sounds cheap. What kind of mics are you using? Where are they positioned? is there a muffle in the drum? The kick needs to be punchier.

just my 2 cents

PS you should have your drummer play the kit, how the drums are played is a big part of the recording process and mic set up.

bob

yeah there is muffling in the two kick drums, and for now i am playing drums for recording so we are making for my playing style. we are a rock band so we want that rock sound. the mics are pretty cheap, they are from a company called superlux. they work fairly well but arent the best. i think the equalization on the kick drum is probably the problem there. we have the mic just sitting in the kick drum on the blanket we have inside it. but the eq on the mic has all of the sound at 100hz pulled out. we did this cause a guy we know told us that would take out the muddy sound. but maybe we took out too much, since we have it set at negative infinity. so i this might be a dumb question, but should we put some 100hz back in? at first i was really opposed to taking out that frequency, i thought it was very important for bass drum, but i dont know too much about that stuff. thanks for the input, keep it comming!

Hey, you're a great drummer! 8) You should definately not pull out any 100Hz from the kick! The muddiness occurs around 300-400Hz! And you should try to put your overheads higher above the cymbals, You can hear one of the crashes (small one) moving up and down when you play it! And you should really check out Recordermans overheadplacement method! Works great, you get a really good stereo image of your kit, with your snare in the middle. Can be found in this thread: (Dead Link Removed)

ok we are going to take a recording with less condenser and with the 100hz back in, but i think ill take out some of the 300-400hz. i'll post the link to the new test as soon as i get it. thanks again, keep the advice coming, i really appreciate it.

re drum micing

What are you recording on? Since you are recording rock drums, you may want to think about compresing the kick and the snare drum to help make each hit close to the same level. And like the other post said, you don't want to cut at 100hz. If you can try and put on some headphones and maybe cut the bad boxy frequincies out, before and/or after tracking. Plus if you can try and get the bass player to play too, with the kick, to try and get them sitting well with each other.

take care
Bobbo

Check out some tracks I did here http://www.purevolume.com/injournalkeptsecret and go to "download" to get a better mp3 quality
this was recorded with a fostex 16 track recorder and cheap little behringer mic pre's and eq. On the kick i used a behringer pre into an alesis 3630 compressor and then into a 31 band graphic eq and into the recorder, and just the behringer pres for everything else.

ok here's a new take, we added some bass 80hz to the bass drum mics, we put back in the 100hz and took out a bunch from the 350hz. the bass drum sounds much better i think, but now we have the problem of the kit being too quiet.

we also positions the room mics a little differently, they are not closer together, which made it easier to get the panning of certain drums right.

we record using a behringer mixer by the way, it has a compressor effect built in but it compresses all the channels on the mixer so i dont think that would be good cause then the condensor mics would be compressed too. we do have compressor plug-ins too in our recording program, but the same problem occurs, we cant stop the compressor from compressing the two condensors.

that other thread that was mentioned wasnt really easy to follow cause of the simple fact that our setup is different, the double bass drum thing is really tough to get around. so anyway i hope this take sounds better. maybe the snare could be louder i think. anyway let me know, thanks again for all the input!

re new recording

I like your first recording better, the snare and the toms sounded really good, now they sound too dull and kind of like they are out of tune. so do what ever you did for the first recording and then you just need to work on the kick drum.

try boosting the lows and cutting the low mids and then adding some high eq, almost to the point where you think its too much because how you are recording you are probably going to loose some high end clarity using the compression.

bob