Being a drummer myself, I'm always looking for a better way to record drums. The other day I tried recording individual pieces of my drums and then sequencing them in DP3. It came out better than I thought it would. I used an Audix D4 inside the kick (I have Tama Starclassic Maple drums which are awsome) and a tube condenser about 3 ft away. The tracks didn't sound too hot at first but when I went in and put the two tracks into phase with one another they sounded great!
Now for my question. What if I recorded a drumset using close Micing then went back and pulled the tracks into phase with each other? Shoot me down please if this is stupid.
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Rick is right on with a great response. In addition to his reply
Rick is right on with a great response. In addition to his reply, moving the drum tracks may make them sound better but at the risk of changing the dynamic and rhythm feel within the song which is usually more important. But having the option and the time available means you can experiment and see what it buys you. But like all things in phyisics, every action has a reaction so many times making one thing sound better also can make one or more things sound worse.
hi there. new around here, but I recently was working on a ba
hi there.
new around here, but I recently was working on a batch of experiments for myself regarding this subject. my conclusions, as stated in the previous posts is that yes it can sound good in certain situations. i personally found it to be not worth the effort of evaluating all the tracks, nudging everything around, re-evaluating...and so on. as for maintaning the 'groove' it never seemed to be an issue for me. i only ever had to move stuff around in the 10s of ms range. the performance never suffered as the rhythmic relationship of the notes was never tampered with. the bottom line i think, is that AEs have been recording drum kits for decades that are not %100 phase coherent from track to track, and we've done pretty well for ourselves so far. but i think experimentation is good.
AP
Originally posted by doubleOtim: ...Now for my question. What
:) I'll take a stab, it might work on some things, but moving some individual drum tracks into better phase may end up moving other sounds reaching those mics out of phase. I look at the catch 22 like this...(My TV Analogy)..Color has a phase with respect to rotation in degrees. Hue is an offset of the center of rotation.
IOW, putting the mics in proper phase in the first place takes into account off axis coloration. This critical placement of mic(s) in three dimensional space cannot always be corrected with a simple linear adjustment.
Certain dominant sounds may benefit by this type of adjustment, but most will not. There are too many mixed sounds reaching that point in space and time, the position of the mics, to the source, and each other. There are several really good groups of threads on drum mic phase deep into this forum, also check the Producers, Engineers, and Hardware forum.
--Rick