Aggressive Drums: The Recording Guide
Aggressive Drums:
The Recording Guide
Forewords
Drummer
Drums
Drumheads
Drum Tuning
Cymbals
Recording Room
Cymbals
Snare Drum
Kick Drum
Toms
Ambience
Drum Triggers
Setting the Levels
Building a Headphone
   Mix and a Tempo Map
Sampling the Drumkit
Combining the Takes
Microphone Preamps and Pre-Processing
Final Words
Sources
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FaderWear Guides
Guides Index
Aggressive Drums:
The Recording Guide
Extreme Master Bus Processing: Compression and Saturation
Parallel Compression
Guitar Re-Amping
Split Harmonizer



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Things to Do Before the Recording
Building a Headphone Mix and a Tempo Map
To make the drummer perform well, you need to create a headphone mix that will inspire the drummer. Usually sending the kick, overheads and click track + all the other instruments the drummer wants to hear is enough. I make the kick very clicky sounding by boosting the highs and cutting the lows. This way the headphone amplifier will have more headroom. Make sure the drummer is hearing the stereo image of the overheads correctly: he might be wearing the headphones backwards! If the drummer is hitting the hi-hat like a maniac, a good trick is to send it to the drummer's headphones very loudly.
When you build a click track, use the metronome functions in your DAW! This is very important. You will see a grid that will make editing, "punching," overdubbing and mixing much easier. Most DAW's support importing midi, so you can ask the band to create the click tracks themselves before they enter the studio.


Copyright (c) 2007-2008 Santeri Salmi