The Light of Day

So you want to make an album? (part 13)
KeithHandy posted in Instruments, Playing, Producing, So You Want..., Tools on May 12th, 2007

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Installment 13: Be a drum slut (you’ll love it!)

When it comes to layin’ drum tracks, I ain’t no vanilla cherry, honey. I am, indeed, a drum slut. I’ve done drums in every place you can name, in every imaginable way. Before recording the other tracks. After recording the other tracks. Real drumset played by someone else for my song, with or without a click track. Real drumset played by someone else for their song and “stolen” for use in my song (mmm, so naughty). Real drum set played by me. Back when I was under-age, I recorded myself hitting pillows with sticks (and I’ll be damned if it didn’t sound just like… pillows being hit with sticks!) — and I was also using the built in rhythms on organs and toy keyboards. I’ve created makeshift drum-like sounds with a synthesizer, and likewise with a Commodore 64. I’ve done oral. (Yes, “oral” — I was mouth-drumming before beatboxing took off.) Played a drum machine by hand. Programmed a drum machine. Programmed a computer sequencer which then played the drum machine. Played a drum machine by hand into the computer’s sequencer, and then used that to fix/tighten/clean up my performance. Programmed a computer sequencer to play samples of real, actual drums that I’d originally hit with a real, actual drumstick (this is one of my favorite positions methods lately). Ain’t no lie, I’ll try anything once, sugar.

Why so many different ways? Lots of reasons. Sometimes you just have to use whatever is available to you. Sometimes you want to try something different. Sometimes the song demands that you do something different (I love it when the song gets bossy). Sometimes you think you’re being super-creative and all you’re really doing is making a mess. But that’s okay too, because we all gotta learn.

Since 1.) this series is geared more at home recordists than at bands going into pro studios, and 2.) home is where the revolution is happening anyway, I’m going to assume you’re recording one instrument at a time. The logical thing to do is to record a drum track before anything else, whether it’s real drums or machine drums. If you’re a little crazy, it is actually possible to record other instruments like guitars first, but only if there’s a good reason, or if you have experience doing so. (I know one guy that always does his drums last — he has to crank his headphones to the max to hear what he’s playing along to — but he’s so intimately familiar with his own songs, that even when there are breaks between sections, he can intuitively “feel” how long to pause before starting up again.)

On some of my own songs (listen to Have You Heard the Good News? for an example), the guitar holds the groove for most of the song, and the drums only come in on one verse. I could have started with a click track for the whole song, but then the rhythm of the initial guitar track might have felt too rigid, and I wanted it to be natural. So I played the guitar part “free”, i.e. not to anything, and then played the drum machine by hand over the third verse. On Never Turn Back, I actually did it this way (guitar first, then played the drum machine) for the whole song, partly just because I’m nuts, and partly because, again, I wanted the acoustic guitar to have a really natural feel to it. No click or reference was used, so the song is at whatever tempo I naturally played the guitar at. Playing a drum machine to an existing track is at least a little easier than doing so with a real set, because you can do it at a volume that won’t make you deaf. Be picky, though. If a bit doesn’t “feel” right, do something about it, because a half-assed drum part will kill a song.

If you know drums will be playing for most of the duration of your song, as in most pop/rock songs, the logical and sane thing to do is to record them first. This is not without its own challenge; if there are fills, accents, or breaks that happen in certain spots, you need to be able to mentally keep track of where you are in the song. Even if there is a section where you don’t want drums, say an intro for example, you could just play a “placeholder” beat for that part and remove it later. Always give yourself a one-measure count-off at the beginning, or you will be cursing yourself as you try to nail the first chord on overdubs. Setting the ideal tempo can be tricky; for drum machines, play and sing along with it to see if it feels right before committing to it. For real drums, maybe play and sing the song with your keyboard or guitar first to get the tempo in your head, and watch out for that human tendency to speed up as you go along.

Often times, after creating what you think is the ultimate drum track, you will put your overdubs down and then wish the drum part was a little different. There’s no easy rule for how to avoid this; it takes a certain amount of experience and foresight. If you’re not sure, it’s generally better to keep it really simple than to get fancy, because everything else you do will be adding to it. Something like a cymbal crash can always be overdubbed later if you think a transition isn’t getting enough emphasis. Another thing I’ve noticed with drum machine parts is, if you have velocity sensitive pads and some hits are a lot quieter than others, the quieter hits can rapidly disappear into near-inaudibility when you start putting overdubs on. So it’s best not to overdo the dynamics if you know there will be a lot of other things on top.

Recording the sound from a drum machine is a no-brainer; the work has already been done for you. Just patch it directly in and record it. Comparitively, recording a real kit in your home studio will prove to be a challenge as far as microphone placement and setting levels. The tight, clean, well-defined drum sounds on studio recordings are the result of microphones being placed right near the drumheads, generally one mic per drum, plus a pair of overhead mics to capture cymbals and room ambience. In all likelihood, your project studio may not have as many mics or recording inputs as you would like, yet you may still want to record a set anyway. This is fine, just be aware that your sound will be a compromise, and you may need to experiment a lot with the overall mix to get a sound that you find acceptable.

If you record with only one or two microphones, it is best to hang them several feet above the set, and then some after-the-fact multi-band compression might help you bring out the lacking “oomph” of the kick drum without muddying everything up the way an ordinary EQ might. If you have a couple more mics, it’s generally recommended that you close-mic the snare and the kick, and record them to separate tracks so you can adjust them afterwards. If, however, like a lot of home recordists, you don’t have a multi-channel soundcard, you can combine the sounds from multiple mics on the fly with a small mixer — you won’t know what it sounds like until after you record it and play it back, and you won’t be able to re-adjust the balance later, so you’ll need to record and listen back to some short “test takes” before starting work on the actual song.

Do a Google search on “miking drums” (without the quotes). A lot of what you find and read, you may not be able to do with the equipment you currently have, but the general principles will still be valuable. I’ll link to a few of them, but there are so many good articles out there that you really should do a full search yourself when you have time for explorin’.

A few years ago, a friend and former drummer of mine left his drums at my studio for a while, so I tried a session or two of playing the set myself. Your mileage my vary on this, but from my own experience, it may be helpful to let you know that I wish I had played them a bit louder, or rather, more consistently loud. Because drums are so much louder than other acoustic instruments, a non-drummer will tend to play relatively quietly. It will sound loud in the room, but you can tell on playback when you didn’t capture the familiar sound, timbre, or character of “loud hits”.

From these same sessions, I isolated, copied, and saved some of the better sounding drum hits and cymbal crashes to create a personal library of drum samples. When you think too hard about individual sounds, you tend to over-embellish them. These natural sounds — cleaned up a bit, but not “sweetened” much — sound nice and organic when I use them in conjunction with a sequencer. On my old Windows box, I used Cakewalk as the sequencer (think “the robot that plays the instrument”) and Mellosoftron as the sampler (think “the instrument being played by the robot”) which produces the actual sound. On my Mac, I can do it all self-contained within Tracktion.

It’s worth mentioning here that seemingly dull and ordinary drum sounds are often ideal in the larger context, since you usually don’t want the drums to be hogging all the listener’s attention anyway. Having realized this, my current “drum set” sounds pretty realistic, and I can use it in a lot of songs without getting sick of it — whereas a while back, particularly in the competitive climate of 80s, the pressure was on to blow everyone else off the charts with the ultimate, big, bad, in-your-face “snare drum to end all snare drums”. It took me a while to recover from that.

A whole universe of techniques, some of which might be considered “cheating” if you were in a “real band” with a “real drummer”, is out there for less-pigeonholed artists to explore without guilt. Don’t be afraid to try recording your drum parts in separate layers, or to combine the drum machine with a real drumset. Try, for example, using the drum machine for a simple, tight, clean kick/snare groove, and then overdubbing real cymbals. Try playing the drums at half the actual speed of the song, and then speeding it up on playback for a cute and infectious “toy drums” sound. Try looping your best measure or two (or four, or thirteen) of drumming. Try using the drum machine for the hi-hat, the drumset for the kick, your mouth as a snare, and the contents of your silverware drawer being dumped on the kitchen floor as a crash. (Try to get your pets involved too, and if you can get your neighbor to scold you for something, that’s always a fun thing to catch on tape.) Remember, a good sounding rhythm track will only give you half of your satisfaction; the other half will come from the scandalous stories you can tell afterwards about how you did it.

So what are you waiting for? Be a drum slut. You’ll love it. It’s a way of life.