Recording and Mixing Your Drums

Hello and welcome to the recording course!

People often ask me how I achieve my drum sound in recordings. We have another course devoted to live sound, where I talk about the QSC mixer, and how I use it on stage. This course will help you understand some of the answers from the studio aspect.

For now, we’ll focus on close-mic’ing each drum while also using overheads and a room mic. Soon, I’ll add a segment devoted to varied, smaller area-mic setups. A follow-up course will focus on mixing concepts.

The course takes you through my complete process for recording drums for a jazz/fusion setting. It moves through several stages of how I get my sound in the studio.

We’ll talk about:

The room: the importance of your space and ways you can improve dynamics and sound shaping within it

The drums: making sure that tuning intervals and drum dynamics match the sound you’re looking for, in a given song.

The mics: mic choices, setting them up, and understanding the dynamics they offer

Mic preamplifiers: using them, and their significance with respect to getting the most out of your mics

Phase coherency: understanding how the mics relate to each other when recording your drums, and avoiding ‘out of phase’ mics

Setting levels: a very important stage, to allow clean signals without distortion

Recording to a track: I’ll play along with “Get To It” to help put this all into perspective

I’ll make adjustments along the way – in terms of tuning, mics, and more. It’s all about knowing what you want, listening, and knowing what to do in order to get the sound you’re looking for.

I hope you find the course helpful. Take some time to let it all set in. As always, please post questions in my private Facebook group. And make sure to do as much research as possible. A wide variety of recording techniques and applications can be found all over the Web.