Recording - April 2013 - 35

this new aux track “SQUASH”. I now have
two stereo aux tracks with the same drum
mix on them. On the SQUASH aux I inserted a compressor plug-in and compressed
the heck out of it! That’s right—smash this
track like you would never dare smash your
main drum aux. By mixing a little of this
track in you get some of the awesome
smash of extreme compression without the
flat and lifeless sound that hard compression
can sometimes create.
I have included two downloadable examples of this technique. The first example,
Squash Slow, uses slow attack and release
times on the squash track to accentuate the
initial impact transients of the kick and
snare. Suddenly it sounds like my drummer
got really angry and started whacking the
heck out of everything! The second example, Squash Fast, uses fast attack and
release times. This makes the impact quieter
and the natural room reverb louder. As I
bring up the squash fader I hear the drums
recede back into the room, and the room
seems to get bigger. Mess with those attack
and release times and see what happens!
You can also try parallel compression further upstream in the mix by making parallel
mono auxes for your kick and snare. Try this
on anything, bass, vocals, whatever. You’ll be
surprised! And for those of you on the bleeding edge, yes, this is the old-school way to get
this effect with any compressor plug-in; many
modern compressor plug-ins have a mix knob
now, so you can mix the compressed signal
with the uncompressed and do this without
having to set up an extra aux track.
The TRASH mic
You may be saying to yourself, “Well,
Mike, these tricks are good for getting great
punchy clean sounds, but clean engineering
is so UNCOOL these days! How do I get
some simulated bad engineering GRUNGE
happening?” Well, look no further, my
friend, here comes the TRASH MIC.
We stuck a condenser cardioid (I don’t
even remember which one but I’m pretty
sure it was the crappiest mic I could find)
way over at the other end of the room, pointing into a grand piano. We then held the
sustain pedal down with a cinder block so
the strings would vibrate in sympathy with
the drums. This track is labelled “Trash”,
and if you solo it you will agree it sounds
pretty awful, but the kids LOVE awful these
days! (Just look at those earlobes!)
This track is the key to some real indie
rock street cred. In the example Trash 1 I
filtered out the low end and brought this
track up and—instant garage rock! It really puts a whole different vibe onto the mix.
Check out the tom fills in the middle of the
track—it’s like Phil Collins on bath salts.
For even more fun check out Trash Snare,
where I expanded this track with the
expander keying off the Snare Key bus, so
you only hear the trash mic when the snare
gets hit. On Trash Kick I did the same thing
RECORDING April 2013

using the Kick Key bus. (Check out Part 2 of this article in last month’s issue
for an explanation of how to use the key feature on an expander.)
In conclusion
I hope you have some wild new ideas after reading this article. Again,
the goal was to record drums with very close mics so that we could create
many different ambiences artificially and drastically alter sounds with
expanders, compressors, and eq. The big room and the addition of the
spaced pair of room mics gives us a natural reverberation that we can further mangle to come up with natural as well as crazy-sounding spaces.
Your big-sounding room can be a concrete basement, small garage,
a warehouse, or a church that you can sneak into late at night. Don’t
try this on your next jazz mix... but do get down with your bad self all
over your next rock project!
Michael Schulze (schulze@recordingmag.com) directs the Music Recording
and Production Bachelor’s degree program at the Lamont School of Music,
University of Denver (www.du.edu/lamont/audio).

http://www.du.edu/lamont/audio http://www.mil-media.com/HV-37.html http://www.mil-media.com

Recording - April 2013

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