Recording - April 2013 - 34

the snare on Foo Fighters’ “Bridge Burning”. In this
case the snare is obviously ringing out longer than normal, but not in a stretched, squashed sort of way.
This expansion/compression technique is especially
useful on rack toms, because with careful adjustment
of the expander and compressor combination you can
create any kind of decay you want, from a long toneful ring with an abrupt cutoff to a shorter decay that
leaves space in the mix. I was able to shorten and
clean up my toms in this way by using compressor and
expander settings similar to those on my kick.
I inserted compressors on my overheads too, setting the threshold to result in no more than 3 dB of
gain reduction. Finally, on my drum aux track I have inserted yet
another compressor with fast attack (4 ms) and release (20 ms)
times. I am only letting this compressor do
about 1 dB of gain reduction. It is really there
just to catch a few fast transients here and there
in a way that does not really change the sound.
By knocking back these peaks at this stage I
won’t have to go looking for them later in the
mixing process when I am trying to control my
overall levels.
Revisiting eq AGAIN
My compression on the kick and snare fattened
up the sound of those drums, but darkened them
a bit too. So on each of those tracks I added
another eq plug-in after the compressor, doing a
more subtle and wider Q boost at roughly the
same frequencies I had boosted before. I also
added an eq plug-in on the overall drum mix,
again just gently brightening things up a bit.

And now, the ROOM!
The whole point of this endeavor was to record in a
big room, but so far I have been working on the mix
without my room mics. Now that the close mics are
sounding good, I can finally add the special sauce!
The room mics were a spaced pair of singlediaphragm cardioid condensers about 1 meter apart
and maybe 8 feet in front of the kit, as shown in the
photo in Figure 7. I filtered some lows and low mids
out of this stereo track to clean things up a bit. Bringing
the fader up slowly added air and girth to the sound,
and filled in the space between my dry close mics.
Compressing the room mics can change the mix
dramatically. By messing with the compressor’s attack time on this
stereo track, I found a spot around 40 ms that really made the kick
jump out. Allowing 6 dB of gain reduction, I
7 was able to greatly enhance the weight of the
set while retaining a very natural sound.
However, compressing the room mics harder
can give the sense of making the room larger.
By setting the attack to 12 ms, the release to 5
ms, and pulling the threshold down, I was able
to get 12 dB of very quick gain reduction happening. The fast release opens up the compressor during the natural reverberation of the
drums in the room and makes the room sound
bigger than it really is.
Parallel compression
This is an old trick from the ancient analog
days. As you can see in Figure 8, I created a
new stereo aux track and fed it from the same
bus that is feeding the main drum aux. I named

http://www.cloudmicrophones.com http://www.cloudmicrophones.com

Recording - April 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2013