EQ Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 43)

was getting the attack from the beater. Initially, I had the front heads taken off the kick drums, but the drummer said his pedals weren’t reacting the same, so we put them back on. Then, I then built an ‘acoustic shell’ using Auralex LENRDS bass traps that surrounded the front of the kicks to stop any sounds from bleeding into the room mics. I also rolled off everything below 200Hz in the overhead mics.” UP WITH SAMPLES There are tremendous advantages to recording drums tweaked for triggering, but let’s admit to one failing: The band has to listen to drums that sound “bad” throughout the tracking process. “I’m very happy that Seed trusted me to try this,” admits Rottler. “Even though we tried listening back primarily to the room mics, we still had to turn up the bad-sounding trigger tracks in order to hear everything that was going on. The band members had to sit through two days of listening to floppy kicks and dead-ass toms before I got all of the triggered samples in place.” And, as the drum samples were edited and snapped to a rhythm grid, the bliss of triggered drum samples was extremely apparent. For one thing, drummers can’t complain about the drum sound, because the source samples are constructed from their very own drums. However, if you want to change the pitch of the drums to better match the key of the song, it’s easy to use a plug-in such as SoundToys Pitch Doctor to “tune” the drums to a major third, fourth, or fifth. In addition, punching in is way easier, because the drummer doesn’t have to worry about matching the precise timbres of the already recorded tracks. “We punched in a lot during the drum sessions, and there’s no way I could have been able to get the drummer hitting the kick drums and toms with a perfect, repeatable attack all day long,” says Rottler. “By not having to worry about the tones, the drummer was free to concentrate solely on the performance of his punches and overdubs, and that definitely made the punch-in process less stressful for him.” To hear the recordings discussed in this article, visit Seed’s MySpace page at www.myspace.com/seedfinklestein. www.eqmag.com MARCH 2008 EQ 43 http://studioprofiles.com http://studioprofiles.com http://www.myspace.com/seedfinklestein 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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