ORIGINAL: Inthorns
I am looking to diversify my percussion a little bit. I can't fathom recording live drums at this point(I'm not THAT good acoustically, I don't even use foam yet).
On the other hand I haven't worked with loops much either. Just about enough to know that there aren't many suitable right out of the box. Which thickens the confusion even more with the need for a loop slicer(seemingly invaluable in loop world).
I was basically hoping that, since we all indeed love chattin' about music, you could fill me in on some drum production whether it be live, loop, or both. Maybe micing techniques or a good user friendly loop slicer?? I think this would give me a good reference.
Thanks guys,
Ron
Ron,
It's a big topic and there are all sorts of ways to skin a cat these days and depending on what kinda drums you are producing i.e electric and acoustic.
I guess acoustic kits are my thing as I've been playing and recording them since the '70's.
Starting with recording the real thing 4 mics I would suggest is the minimum requirement a specialist close mic for the kick I still love the old AKG D12's for that purpose but they are increasingly rare but both Shure and AKG do good modern equivalent dynamics that cope with the big SPL's associated with a kick drum. Next up is the Snare again my preference would be a good dynamic mic a Shure SM57 would be ideal there for starters.
From those basics the next most important would be the overheads and here we veer off into condenser mics as we want to pick the brights from the cymbals and hats as well as a clear all-over picture of the kit preferably a stereo picture so if possible we want 2. Neumann KM 86's work well for this purpose but there are many adequate alternatives that can be had much more cheaply these days.
Having got that far everything else becomes a bonus as you will be able to successfully record drums with this minimum. Going from there I'd probably add in this order and I'll use Nuemann's as a guide for no other reason than to get you in pretty much a good ball park there are plenty of alternatives these days.
Hi-hat Neumann U87 or maybe if you want more spaciousness Neumann TLM 103
Toms: Neumann U87 or KM56's
Snare Bottom: Something like an AKG 414 to pick the 'sympathetic snare bleed' from the other drum parts and the 'crispness' of the snare itself
Ambience (or Room): 2 Neumann U87 don't be hard and fast with the Ambience mic's as this is where you can add and develop your own particular sound by experimenting with placement and the type of mic, I've often used 'Radio Shack' cheap as you like PZM's here with great success but the idea of the Room mic is to get a spatial feel of the kit so they are normally place at the extremities of the room.
So as you will deduce from that common kind of setup in your DAW you will want to cover the three main sources of input. Close mics, Overheads and Ambience. (plus your snare bottom mic that you can have allsorts of fun with by mixing it in with the other parts.)
Midi:
From the above description of a 'real' setup to simulate this scenario using midi you'll want to get sample library's that follow this sort of setup and offer some flexibility of incorporating your own drums whilst having AT LEAST these multi-mic sample options, Toontracks products are great for providing this capability but they have the caveat of being fairly tied to the kits THEY produce and leave little flexibility as far as I can tell for adding further libraries of your own, but if you like the sound of their stuff its a good ready to roll option. My favourite for multi outs AND flexibility would probably be Battery or Reason, Battery being a dedicated drum solution providing probably more ease of use, but Reason has a refill called RDK 2 which takes the hard work of setting up its NN-XT samplers to do the job and gives you some 'studio' style signal paths (compression, limiting, eq...etc) right out of the box. There are others too BFD, Addictive Drums etc that fit into a similar bracket (some will of course swear by those as we all have different needs and preferences).
Of course you will need someone or something to play (or trigger) these 'simulated' kits, Route 1 would be playing a V-Drums or similar electronic kit through one of 'em directly but for most mortals we have to code them, there are various libraries of varying qualities out there some played and some programmed but ALL of them will require you to get your hands dirty at some point and start moving things around a bit to overcome the canned loop sound.
There are some good aids to producing a reasonably realistic feel to your midi efforts not least the groove tools supplied by Cakewalk, but Herb has mention Jamstix already and from hearing his stuff it makes a good fist of it and of course you can play it out through any of the setups I've mentioned above so it has flexibility beyond what comes with it.
Another indispensable tool is Toontrack's Ezplayer of which there is an excellent free version available on the toons site which will aid you in auditioning midi loops and arranging them in your sequence as well as keeping them all tidy.
Loops:
Actual played loops are available in many formats and mostly they sound cracking, the drawback here is the lack of flexibility in changing the feel to suit the song. For that reason a good way to go about here is to lay out a killer drum track FIRST and build your song around it and it will sound like you got a session guy to lay down the track for you. Trying to find loops to fit your song afterward can often mean fruitless hours auditioning loops that ain't gonna work.
Rex or Acidised loops can help here in that you can change the grooves to fit taking advantage of the sliced nature of the recorded material but I must admit to not having much success here for an acoustic sound but for Electronica the sky seems to be the limit with this approach.
I hope this covers the ground a little of course I haven't gone into mixing and getting a great sound out of all these methods but hopefully it'll kick someone down the path of giving it a go and moving beyond the 'driving a fork-lift through packing crates' sound that alas is still too common.
HTH
Links:
Ezplayer Free
http://www.toontrack.com/ezplayer_free.asp Wave Knife cut individual slices from .WAVs (thanks Mike McCue for that one)
http://www.spacetaxi.de/sf/waveknife.html Loops:
BeatCreator Loop samples in various formats
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Audio-Mixers-Synthesizers/BeatCreator.shtml The props clunky but faithful ol' Rex Looper
http://www.propellerheads.se/products/recycle/
post edited by Jonbouy - 2008/10/22 23:46:27