Recording - October 2014 - 34

Bringing it to a boil: the drums
When everything is laid out for me to start listening
and dialing in sounds, I start with the kick drum. It
depends on the nature of the material, but usually the
kick drum ends up needing to be a bit louder in a full
mix than where it will sound and feel right when you
are just listening to the drums alone. You'll always
want to go back and re-assess that, once you add
bass and guitars. If there are two kick drum signals-
inside and outside mics, or a kick mic plus an external Yamaha SubKick (a reverse-wired speaker which
acts as a mic that picks up very low frequencies), for
example-I work on blending the two sounds together so that the kick drum is both punchy and full,
assuming that is what the material calls for.
The other very important thing I do is check the
phase. Phase is the little known but supremely powerful dark monster that hides under every engineer's
bed, waiting to jump out and make their tracks sound
thin, disembodied, or even disappear completely. I
am not going to attempt to teach you what phase is-
I happen to know that in the next issue or two, our
Paul Stamler has a huge article on the subject coming
up!-but I will tell you that I check for phase-coherence between the two kick drum signals and between
snare top and snare bottom. Sometimes I have even
time-aligned the drums to the overheads to ensure
perfect phase coherence, even though in general I
find that with a good-sounding and well-tuned drum
set, that level of time alignment is usually not necessary to achieve a good drum sound. Again, it all
starts with the good ingredients!
Once you have a good and healthy kick/snare/hihat relationship, it's time to add the rest of the drums.
Depending on how roomy a sound you want for the
drums, it can be useful to dial in overheads right
away. Some people dial them in at the end and
aggressively highpass the overheads, using those signals only for the high end sizzle of the cymbals.
However, one should never underestimate the added
body and punch that overheads can lend to the entire
kit, so more often than not I won't aggressively filter
the overheads. Instead, I'll dial them in before I add
the toms to the drum mix, so that the toms benefit from
the attack and air that comes from the overheads. For
the record (no pun intended!), if the material I am mixing is more jazz than rock, I usually rely more heavily
34

RECORDING October 2014

on the overheads for the entire drum sound and only add the other mics in
around the overheads.
If you have recorded room mics for your drums, it is now the time to
work with those and decide how much back slap from the room you want
to hear. Gentle EQing and ballsy compression with high ratios and fast
release times can help you achieve a larger-than-life room size. You can
trick the listener into thinking that the drums were recorded in a much bigger space than they actually were... assuming you had positioned your
room mics correctly to allow you to do that in the first place (good ingredients, remember?).
If I am mixing in the analog domain, for the room mics I sometimes use
a pair of linked Empirical Labs Distressors. If I am mixing in the box, I will
either use a McDSP Channel G compressor (one of my favorite plug-ins) or
an 1176 compressor plug-in, usually the Pro Tools stock one from Bomb
Factory. If you are using an 1176, whether a real one or a plug-in, it's
important to know that the attack and the release knobs get faster as you
turn the knobs clockwise. Most compressors out there are the opposite
(clockwise is slower and counter-clockwise is faster); a lot of people don't
know that about the 1176 and therefore miss out on some great sonic possibilities. Another great thing about the 1176 on room mics is its "British
Mode" trick (also referred to as "all-buttons mode"), which is when you
press down all four ratio buttons at the same time, giving you a ratio of
somewhere between 12:1 and 20:1. Many compressors and plug-ins
based on the 1176 design offer this mode, and it's quite useful.
In the end, it's all up to your taste to decide how much room sound you
want to hear. In my experience, room mics work best with slow to midtempo material so that you have time to hear that room reverberation, but
when the music is fast they could very well muddy up your drum mix. So
use them with caution!

Let's add the beef stock: the bass
Any vegetarians in the house? I hope not, because this is where we add
the basic flavor.
The next step would be to bring in the bass. Needless to say the bass is
the beef of your dish! It is not a coincidence that the adjective "beefy" is
often used to describe full, bassy, powerful sounds. The bass is your foundation, and you must have a solid foundation to build anything.
I like to compress my bass-usually I do between 4:1 and 6:1 on a McDSP
Channel G plug-in or a real Urei 1176 unit-and I always check for phase
coherence between my Bass DI and my Bass amp signals before blending the
two to my liking. When I record an upright bass instead, I usually forgo the DI
completely and add a second microphone closer to the bridge, to pick up the
string snap and the sound of the upright bass at the fingerboard. I then mix that
sound in with the fuller sound of the upright as captured near its F-hole until I
get the balance just right. I check my phase here, too!
Although many bass players are sometimes outright opposed to using
a DI or don't care for the sound of the DI alone (and in the case of

Recording - October 2014

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