Recording - January 2012 - 49

Toms The first thing I consider on the tom tracks is, do I want all the bleed picked up and recorded by the tom mics to remain in the mix? Often, the toms aren’t struck very frequently, so it is very easy to use your DAW software to simply cut out all audio existing between the tom hits. See Figure 1 (next page). The top track is a mid tom, the bottom a floor tom. You can see it would be easy to isolate the tom hits based on the waveform display. Removing bleed makes for a tighter-sounding drum kit, but on the other hand you may be happy with the more live sound of the drums when leaving this audio in. Give it a listen both ways and choose what’s best for your song. Frank’s take on this is: “You may want to remove the other instruments that bled into the tom mics to get rid of the low ringing of the toms that can happen while the other drums are being played (Kick and Snare). This has a couple of benefits. It allows any eq and reverb you may add to the toms to not affect the other drums and cymbals. It also gives a tighter sound to the kit in general.” The goal of using eq on the toms is to get them to cut through the mix, and which frequencies you choose to

boost or cut is dependent on the style of music you are working on. If pushed to present a general guideline, I’d say start by cutting 300–400 Hz. The toms can be compressed at around a 4:1 ratio and you’ll want to use a longer (increased) release setting than recommended for the kick drum. You can experiment with a short reverb, but toms are a naturally sustaining instrument and reverb may not be necessary. Pan the toms based on your chosen perspective. Snare Ah, the all-important snare drum! Hopefully, the sound of the snare drum was given a good deal of attention during the recording and the drummer chose the correct size and type of drum for the style being recorded. Some songs call for a fat, meaty snare sound and some for a thin, cutting sound. Along with that, we hope the engineer worked on getting just the right mic placement to complement the choice of drum. He or she might have even used two mics placed top and bottom. If your snare sound is in the ballpark, minor eq adjustments suitable to the style of the music should be all that is necessary. If the sound isn’t in the

ballpark, you’ll have to go drastic! There are no real low frequencies in a snare drum, so use a high-pass/low-cut filter to cut everything below 125Hz or so. If a top and bottom mic were used, test the sound you get when reversing the polarity of one of them. Listen to both mics together. If the combination of the two signals sounds better with one reversed, go with it. After choosing the polarity setting, use the top mic as the main sound source for the snare, then, as the full mix is playing, slowly bring up the volume of the bottom mic until it is nicely augmenting the main sound. Snare drums are usually panned center and are often compressed because they tend to jump out of the mix. Initial compressor settings similar to the kick drum will make a good starting point, say a 3:1 ratio with fast attack and release settings. Adjust the threshold to obtain –4 dB or so of gain reduction. I’ve heard it suggested to heavily compress a bottom mic track using a 10:1 ratio. I haven’t tried this yet but I’m passing it along. Snare drum gating and reverb are tricky, I’ll let Frank explain: “Typically, a dedicated reverb is added to the snare track. Since the other drums will of course bleed into

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Recording - January 2012

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