EQ Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 18)

THE ANSWER LIES WITHIN you mic cymbals straight overhead, they sound like big dinner plates—or little gongs—and you end up having to EQ out all the low end to manage them. Those tracks don’t have any natural top end. If you mic them totally sideways, they’re very thin sounding, and they tend to disappear as the cymbal rocks. I try to get an angle as close to 45 degrees as I can to the cymbals, and about four feet away. The only cymbal I point the mic straight down on is the ride. You said that the drums were recorded in a good room. To you, what makes a good room for recording drums? Northfield: An environment with a lot of wood—not a lot of super-hard surfaces. If you have a wood floor, you can always put some carpet under the drums so you don’t get the brittle kickback. Ambience should be more lowend oriented, if possible—not hard or bright. Stone rooms, to me, are generally not interesting to record in. I’ve been in studios that have rooms ranging from very, very dead to rooms with glass and tile—which means the ambience is going to be all cymbals. For a drum kit, neither of those works well. For me, a great-sounding room is something along the lines of a gymnasium—where you’ve got a bit of boom in the walls and floor. Stages can offer a lot of those qualities, as well. I remember drummers would complain their kits To what degree did you exploit the possibilities of Pro Tools—besides utilizing the unlimited track count? Northfield: I used Pro Tools mostly for things like delays. But the biggest advantage with Pro Tools is in the sheer amount of tracks available. That inspired us to lay down tons of alternate tracks— extra fills and such that we could edit in at will during the mix. Portnoy: Scenes From a Memory was the first record we did using Pro Tools. Before then, everything was done on analog tape. On Falling Into Infinity, for instance, I would do five or six different takes of each song, played all the way through. Our previous engineer, Kevin Shirley, and I would listen, make notes, and then start chopping tape. It was a mess. To think that we used to make records like that blows my mind. Is that the only reason to use Pro Tools? Convenience? Northfield: Well, I’m a big Logic user. Logic coupled with Apogee converters and a Symphony card is superb. But it’s not a good idea to walk into a studio, and ask them to use stuff they’re not LARGE “USE AWANT ADRUM IF YOU LOW PITCH—DON’T JUST TUNE THE DRUM DOWN. ” sounded great on stage, but have all the life sucked out in the studio. The room at Avatar Studios does not suck the life out of your kit. It’s not a massive room, but with the kit set up, it’s about 20- to 30-feet open in every direction— although we were set up very close to the back wall—and it has a 30-foot ceiling. It’s an ideal setting. 18 EQ MARCH 2008 www.eqmag.com http://fullcompass.com http://fullcompass.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - March 2008

EQ Magazine - March 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Tool Box Dream Theater Nick Drake LO-FI Recording Tricks Guitar Trax Bass Managment Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Tascam Gigastudio 4 Cakewalk Sonar 7 Crane Song Avocet Cad Signature Series Mic Packs Waves GTR3 Kjaerhus MPL-1 Pro SE Ableton Live 7 Centrance Micport Pro, Tapco LINK.midi 4x4, Multi-Gigabyte USB 2.0 Memory Sticks Digital Redux Electrotech, Nine Volt Audio Action Drums, Big Fish Audio Hadeeth 2 Room with a VU

EQ Magazine - March 2008

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