Surround On Mono Drums – Do Or Don't?

I'm especially wondering what drummers would think of this, but I'm open to anyone's opinion. Some of you may recall that I've got some cassette tapes from the early 90's of my old drummer friend, Bret. We just recorded scratch tapes onto an Audio Technica AT-RMX64 4-track cassette that we kept in our rehearsal space back then. They were just supposed to be something to work out tunes with. I had a Teac A3440s 4-track open reel deck at home, and Bret's brother, Kurt (played keys), had a midi studio with an 8-track ADAT, and we would do final recordings at Kurt's place.

I know the Audio Technica was just a cassette deck, but it was the mother of all 4-track cassettes. A huge beast that ran at 3 3/4 ips with Dolby C, with an extremely nice mixer that had 6 XLR in's, 2 effects sends, channel inserts, 2 headphone outs, 2 bands of parametric EQ etc. It also managed to get 15K of high end (at 0-VU) which is 1k higher than any other 4-track cassette deck I've ever seen. I'm not sure how they did it. Of course this was before Tascam and others started publishing specs rated at –10 VU to make them look better (at -10 VU you could get high end up around 16k or better but you gained noise in the process so nobody really did it).



Anyhow, I owned both the Teac and the Audio Technica decks. I don't own either anymore, but I do still have the 4-track cassette tapes from those sessions. What I tried last year was to play the tapes back at standard cassette speed (drums were on track 1) with a really good old NAD cassette deck I have (not a high speed or 4-track) and record them into my DAW and then use Audition to simply double the playback speed/pitch to where they should be and it worked like a charm.

Now ... the drums were in mono and just recorded with one mic out front of the drums, and just a $300 AKG electric condenser model at that (mics were still outrageously expensive in those days). Needless to say, I've done a lot of work with these drum tracks to get them to sound like anything at all, however, I really loved the way Bret and I worked together (I don’t think he plays much anymore at all). He was the best drummer I ever played with by far. So, I'm trying to make these tracks work for certain projects. I've got a song "Cynthia" I did last year that you can hear on my home page that came from those drum sessions. I'm working on another one now (untitled) and I'm doing something a little different with the drums. I've put a surround sound delay on them that spreads from the middle toward the sides. It’s a little bit like the sound Ringo got on "Let It Be". Actually, I decided I didn't care much for the original tune we recorded the drums to back then, so I wrote a new tune around the already existing drum track.



Anyway, its not something I would normally mix in very much, however, with this particular tune (kind of a power ballad) I thought it worked and of course it has the added bonus of giving a little bit of a stereo spread to a mono drum track. So far, I've only recorded the basic rhythm tracks – guitar/bass/drums. Before I venture any further with the project, I wanted an opinion as to how this sounds. I know the drums will never be "pro" sounding, and this is as good as they will likely sound. I also have a bit of TC reverb on the drums. Anyhow, here's a 1-minute snippet of it. Bear in mind its just the rhythm section and this will eventually have a lot of synth and lead guitar stuff over it. Sorry to be so long winded.

Untitled Song

PS, I don't know why, but this MP3 file sounds a lot better if you download it to your desktop and then play, than if you try to stream it.

Great! I know I could re-record everything and get a better drum sound, but I really love these old drum tracks. Bret was just so darn good at what he did. We were a great fit. We started playing together around 1985 when he was only 19, and after so many years of playing together, he could read me like a book when improvising. He always somehow knew what was coming and would play something perfect for what I was doing. Those were good times.

Having only one mic hurt the kick more than anything. We had the rehearsal studio padded to make it as dead sounding as possible. Boosting the mids at 2500k helped the kick a lot. I think this is as good as I can do with the track EQ wise.

Thanks a bunch man.

I'm a drummer, and I thought they sounded okay, esp concidering the sorce. You did say it was a single mono drum track ? I agree I would of liked it a little more punchy on the kick, but I'm not sure how far you could of went with that, except maybe something like voxengo elephant, yet that may of over emphisized everything on the track. Waves Ultra Maximizer+ (I think thats the one with eq?) may of done it, but like you say, you already eq'd it. Now sure, as I usally play around with things till it sounds right. I listened on my studio monitors though, and sounds good to me other than a lack of punch. Had they been multi mic'ed I'm sure you could of had it sounding awome, but this is better than I would have come out with on a single drum track.

ORIGINAL: Joe Bravo

Well, thanks for the input guys. I thought this sounded pretty good, but I was afraid I was letting wishful thinking cloud my judgment. You know how that is.

"Those multitrack cassettes were pretty cool. I rented one to do a project back in 1990. It was a Tascam 8 track with the mixer built in."

That just had to have come from Dale's Music. I used to go out there all the time. Bob Mazzio own's his own store now out in Edwardsville called ... umm ... Mingos or something like that.

Right you are. Dales Music was never much of a retail store, but it was a good rental place.