Tracking Log and Analysis

Drum Tracking for Blessed Be Your Name

Drummer: Matt Clarkson

We arrived at the studio at 17:00, 15 minutes before our scheduled start time and began taking out mics from the technical store so that we could enter and begin at the very beginning of our session. From a time management point of view we didn’t hit all of our targets; we weren’t fully set up until 18:15, 15 minutes later than I had planned. Even so the set up felt rushed, the snare that we used needed a new head, resulting in some ring that was frustrating to remove in post production. I also didn’t have time to commit and eq or compression to the short fader (mic input) leaving me more work to do in post.

I should have taken more time to listen in detail to each channel and adjust microphone positions accordingly, for example, it would have been worth trying to put the null point of the snare bottom mic, pointing at the kick drum to reduce bleed.

I had some problems with the kick out microphone that I can now  say with a high degree of certainty was caused by mus routing on the desk, I found that if I listened in to the input from the live room I could hear the kick out microphone but on the long fader (the protools return) I could hear what turned out to be the mono room microphone. I didn’t check this before tracking because I assumed that I had bused everything correctly. I did however realize before we had finished so I very quickly ditched the mono room mic and used that input to take the kick out mic because I viewed that one as more important to my sound. 

All of the critical bits aside, the kick sound was great, I like using an SM57 on the kick in because I feel it could be used as a stand alone sound if something were to happen to my kick out mic, as it nearly did. The kick had some real punch. The room mics also sounded very good, I really squashed them in post and they benefited from being quite low. I did however neglect to measure the room mics in phase  with each other as I did with the over heads.

For my next drum tracking session I will:

Bring an assistant to speed up the set up process

Listen in detail to each of the microphones leaving time to both adjust the microphone placement and also time to eq and compress on input

Check all bus routing on the desk visually then check the returns from each channel

Measure the  room microphones in phase