Drums

The Old 97s like to record as many tracks as possible together, as a band. They are a legendary live band, and recording together is usually essential to capturing their energy. For this album, almost all of the songs were recorded with rhythm guitar, bass, and drums live and in the same tracking room for maximum feel.

We would be using our studio’s drum kit for this album, a butt-ugly yet great sounding 4-piece Yamaha Custom birch kit with Zildjian brass. Our kit is beautifully photogenic and we are always able to get great sounds out of it, but it really “does its thing” when deadened and close-miked for that retro-70s tone, one of our studio’s trademarks. For the Old 97s, we kept it semi-live to dead depending on the song, and used room mics to capture some of the energy of the kit.

I’m a drummer. In my experience, most drummers like their kits loud, brash, and ringy. They’re more impressive that way. A really well maintained kit can record fairly well that way, but in a dense mix it’s nice to be able to winnow out any sounds that aren’t directly musical, and a lot of engineers will start dialing in the gates on the kick, snare, and toms.

I hate gates, so when I want to try to get some of the overtones out of the way, I start damping the drum heads. A lot of drummers will look at me funny while I’m doing it, and flat-out protest when they hear the dead sound of their kit in the room, but when they hear what it sounds like in their mix, they love it.

For the Gravity sessions, we used my tried-and-true method of taping washcloths to the toms. The washcloth is taped to the shell of the drum, and allowed to flip over onto the head. It isn’t taped to the head, so when the tom is struck, it lifts up nicely and the tom develops a full tone. Unlike a ring, however, washcloths never rattle on floor toms. Agreed, it looks absurd, and probably violates 27 different Rules You Learn In Drumming College™, but it works perfectly. And it’s easy to adjust the mass and position of the contact point by just moving it so that more (or less) contact is made. We also used a washcloth on the snare for some songs, but not for Ride. Instead we just used a ring-off for a little more snare energy.

The kit was closed miked with SM-57s on the snare and rack tom, an AKG D112 on the kick, and a Audio-Technica Pro-25 on the floor tom. Overhead we used a pair of AKG C414 B/XLS condensers. I used the Telefunken ELAM 251 in front of the kit to catch the kick drum punch. For room mics, I set up a pair of Sennheiser 421s in a boundary configuration by pointing them at the wall as close as I could get them without touching (more on this later).

The snare mic was preamplified with the Brent Averill 1073, dialed up with a bit of treble zing. The kick mic was also preamplified with a Brent Averill 1073, with just a little mid scoop and treble boost. Overheads were preamped using our Manley dual mono tube pre followed by the Manley ELOP doing just a little light limiting. The toms and room mics were preamplified using the True Precision 8. The ELAM 251 out in front of the kick was run through our dbx 576, with an inordinate amount of whacky EQ and compression (for more on my single-mic setup, read Drum Clinic pt. 1: Kick Drum Viagra).

So what’s the deal with these 421 room mics?They’re the result of an informed guess and weird luck. I’ve read plenty about the use of PZMs (the classic boundary mic) on drum kits, but never really liked them myself. The idea behind a boundary mic makes sense enough: by placing the mic within millimeters of the surface of a boundary (wall), reflections are essentially eliminated. Thus, you can get a big, roomy sound with none of the comb filtering associated with a misplaced room mic. The problem I have with using PZMs this way is that PZMs tend to be bright mics, and thus pick up a lot of cymbals. When blended back into the track with the overheads, the delay between the close overheads and distant PZMs really blurs the cymbals.

Now, there’s no particular magic to a PZM mic that makes it a boundary mic. It’s just a mic pre-attached to a boundary (plate). Of course, the very small capsule of a PZM allows you to get it closer to the boundary, but in theory any mic can be used right up against a wall for similar results. So I tried the 421s and found that, at least in my room, they produced a very round sound, with the treble nicely rolled off, and a fat midrange that really brought out the room sound of the kick, snare, and toms without accentuating or blurring the cymbals. Best of both worlds.

When I’m mixing rock drums, I like to know that if I only use the kick mic and the two overheads, I’ll get a pretty, photogenic sound of the drum kit. I try to mix these three mics so that they produce a very natural, un-hyped sound. Then, I use the close mics and the front-of-kit mic to add energy, weight, and hype to the sound; and finally adjust the room mics to bring in the sense of space.

So, for rock, I tend to hype up the close-miked sounds. I want an overblown close-miked snare sound, so that when I bring it in under the overheads it adds just what they’re missing. And with the toms, I tend to really scoop out the mids so that they’re adding beef and stick attack with very little midrange body.

On the snare, that meant dialing up about a 6 dB boost at 160 Hz to accentuate the meat of the snare, and about a 6 dB high shelf at 6 KHz to emphasize the brightness. On the toms, I used about a 6 dB cut at 380 Hz to reduce the midrange body, and a 4 dB boost at approximately 100 Hz to beef up the tone. The kick didn't need any EQ.

On the snare and tom tracks I just used Sonar’s built-in EQ. But the PEQ2 from Blue Tubes has the magic treble sound I love on overheads. I just dial in a few db of high shelf at 12K, and a few db cut at 300 Hz, and bang, the overheads just sizzle without ever being overbearing or harsh. Of course, the linearity of the Manley tube pre doesn’t hurt either.

I have another trick that I used on this track to get a little extra power from the kick drum. It probably also violates a number of recording laws (including Section 308 of the Texas Penal Code, Felony Use of Altogether Too Many Plugins). While the kick is routed to the main drum bus, I also bring it to a separate bus as well. On that bus I insert the following effects, in this order: Gate, Reverb, Amp Sim, and EQ. The gate (a Sonitus:FX Gate) is set to only allow the kick to pass. The reverb (Lexicon Pantheon) is set to an extremely short reverb. The Cakewalk Amp Sim is set to provide a serious blast of distortion. Finally, the EQ is set to only pass the bass frequencies. The goal is to approximate a low-bass resonance, only in stereo. The result is that I am producing a stereo sub-bass noise blast.Mixed in under the kick drum, it provides weight and space while sounding reasonably natural.

Several generations ago, Cakewalk produced a tape simulator called FX2. I think they forgot about it, but I haven’t. I love using this thing on drum subs. I bring all the drums to a bus and drop the FX2 on it, and get that familiar tape limiting. It has a way of gluing all the mics together that typical compression doesn’t.

The final effect was compelling. The drum sound on Ride (as well as most of the other songs) exemplifies my idea of what straight-ahead rock drums should sound like: just a little bigger than life, but not artificial. More “vivid” than “natural”. There are other ways to skin this cat (and I’ve used a few), but this one really worked well on this album. I really dig the solid, beefy drums we cut.

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