Recording - January 2014 - 63

Bang a gong, get it on...
Most instruments and voices benefit from at least a touch of reverb, but with drums,
the amount and character of reverb is an integral part of the sound. Over the years,
trends in drum sounds have ranged from very wet (with lots of natural reverb) to
almost bone dry (like a dead, padded studio). Nowadays, anything goes when it
comes to drum reverb, and there's more than one way to achieve the desired sound.
When the recording space is large enough, capturing the sound of an actual
room is still the first choice for many engineers-even with today's digital tools, many
people feel that there's still nothing like the richness of natural reverberation to add
depth and sheen to a well-recorded drum kit. Typically, the drum kit would be miked
up as usual: close mics all around, plus a pair of stereo mics overhead (a few feet
over the kit) for air. To add more of the room's sound, additional "room mics" are
added-one (or sometimes two) pair(s), at different distances, recorded on different
tracks. These may even be angled away from the kit, to emphasize the room reverb
and minimize the clatter of delayed attacks. Obviously, a fairly large, ambient room
is required, plus, if other instruments are being recorded at the same time, some kind
of isolation for them, to avoid leakage that would compromise the drum reverb
tracks. The room mics are blended with the close/overhead mics in the mix, to taste.
Sometimes, the room mics are compressed (often heavily) to make the room
sound even fuller. A oft-cited classic example of the use of room mics is the drum
sound on Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks", although the close-miking component is probably less prominent in that song than would be typical today. The
use of room mics on drums is a popular-enough technique that many of today's
high-end sampled drum instruments provide additional recorded room mics to be
blended in, offering the same kind of mixing options as a live recording.
When drums have been recorded in a smaller or deader space, or if (more
basic) sampled drumkits are used, then reverb will have to be added separately via appropriate plug-ins. Keep in mind, not every song needs a lot of
drum reverb-many hiphop recordings feature a very dry ambience overall,
including the drums. But whether the song calls for tight drum tracks, or a big
arena drum sound, you'll want to add some degree of ambience/reverb, at
the very least to provide depth and openness for the drums.
One man's reverb recipe
Of course, everyone has their own approach to putting reverb on drums, but
here's one way I often go about it. When applying reverb to drums, at first I
usually set up at least two separate reverb effects just for the drums (apart from
other reverbs for other tracks)-two plug-ins in two different auxes, fed from separate buses, so I can add as much of either reverb as I want to any drum element. I set one to a smaller, tighter reverb sound, and the other to a larger room.
The smaller reverb is often primarily early reflections, to provide a sense of
three-dimensional space around the various drums in the kit. Adding this to the
drums should impart some depth and air-instead of sitting in front of the mix,
added ambience (shorter reflections) should make the drums seem like they're
closer to the back of the stage, rather than floating dry in front of vocals and
other mix elements. To add a sense of larger space around the drums, I'd then
mix in some of the other reverb, often a larger room, set to a blend that favors
more of the later reflections (the reverberant tail). By sending each drum to both
reverbs in varying amounts, I can try to achieve the best combination of depth
and air, whatever is most appropriate to the song and musical style.
Some drumkit elements will be treated differently than others-I'd add a bit
more of the tight, smaller reverb to a kick, more of the larger verb to the snare
(especially if the snare part consisted of mainly big, solid backbeats), and less of
both to the hi-hats, to preserve more clarity for the fast, subtle, or intricate patterns typical in many styles. When adjusting the decay time of the longer reverb,
I'd take into account the tempo of the song, so any prominent reverb tails (like
on backbeats) won't hang over the barlines too much, muddying up both rhythmic figures and the overall mix. Some engineers go so far as to calculate the
length of a beat (in milliseconds) and set the decay accordingly, to prevent rhythmic "smear"; this is often done with other delay-based effects as well.
When adjusting the tonality (brightness) of the reverbs, I'd take into account the
overall tonality of the drum kit-a warm drum mix might benefit from slightly brighter
reverb, whereas a very bright drumkit might sound cleaner if the reverb was warmer
and less "splattery". Most of the time, since drums have sharp, percussive attacks,
I'd set density high, to avoid the machine-gun clatter of rapid delays. But sometimes
setting lower density/diffusion can make for a kind of slap-echoing-reverb effect, if
applied carefully; this is the kind of thing that might work best on only one drum, like
on snare backbeats, if musically appropriate-possibly by incorporating a separate
reverb plug-in just for the effect.

Sometimes, I might add a bit of a third reverb to
the entire kit, a general-purpose reverb that's also
being added subtly to other elements in the mix.
This puts all the instruments in the same space, when
this would be appropriate-as when the aim of the
mix is to sound more like a live performance. If all
the reverb effects are used carefully and sparingly,
the result won't be a song swimming in verb, but a
cohesive mix, where the elements fit together nicely.
To each his own
And as a final note (at least for this installment), I
wouldn't be afraid to add additional reverb effects to
specific drums or in specific parts of a song, either-
just because there are a lot of plug-ins in use does
not mean that the mix is going to sound overly

processed. If applied subtly, effects like the "reverbecho" described above can add a little something to
the drum part, without calling attention to themselves.
I recall one song where the bridge featured a
slow, isolated kick drum pulse (under some atmospheric instrumentals) that benefited from a big,
dark, booming reverb with a long (2-3 second)
tail. This effect on the kick would have been completely inappropriate (both musically and mix-wise)
elsewhere in the arrangement, but in that one section it elevated the kick-drum part from simple timekeeping to a more dramatic musical gesture.
And on that note, I'll pause-next time we'll look
at using reverb on vocals (and other instruments),
and go into more detail on modern approaches to
reverb like convolution, followed by a brief runthrough of some of the more popular reverb products in use these days. Until then, pull up those
verbs and start pumping up those mixes!
RECORDING January 2014

Recording - January 2014

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