Recording - January 2016 - 16

By Sven-Erik Seaholm
There's 'magic' and there's 'studio magic'.
One lives within the realm of the creative. That perfect moment of confluence
where an excellent performance is
matched by a great 'feel' and the artists'
connection with the music they're playing, resulting in an emotionally engaging
and undeniably pleasurable listening
experience.
Some engineers and producers spend
quite a bit of time painstakingly preparing for just such an event. They carefully
select and set up the mics for maximum
effect: a Shure SM57 on the snare, a
Mojave MA-201fet and an AKG D112
combined on the kick, Audix i5 and
Sennheiser MD421 mics bringing out the
boom of the toms, Royer R-121 ribbons
on the overheads, and an AEA R84 to
pick up room ambience. Then they work
out audio levels and sightlines, capture
everything cleanly, and season it all with
just the right touch of EQ, compression,
and other processing. It's an elaborately
designed butterfly net, lying in wait for
that singularly shining example of the
exquisite to reveal itself.
Other times, there is no time. Studios
hosting several projects concurrently, for
example, often don't have the luxury of
fastidious preparation. Artists pass each
other through virtually revolving doors in
a blur of activity, ever-mindful of those
expensive minutes ticking away like
loose change falling into a gutter. Still,
those magic moments can show up in the
very first takes, and capturing them
remains paramount in the recordists' list
of responsibilities. At the very least, it's a
good idea.
Due to their number, complexity, and
interactivity with each other, the drums are
very often the first place that problems
arise. While guitars or vocals are often
easily covered by a single microphone,
drums can utilize anywhere from 2 to 20!
While this seems as if would give us an
increased amount of control over our
recordings, it actually introduces an exponentially greater possibility for chaos.
16

RECORDING January 2016

In the aftermath of a particularly harried, tense, or even angry recording session,
one may listen back later to discover all manner of mistakes, glitches, and oversights.
Not to mention phase cancellations, bad drum tuning, and poor mic choices or
placement. There are myriad mustaches we can paint upon our Mona Lisas; 'studio
magic' is what we use to address those issues. It's not wizardry, though-it's work.
Getting a perspective
Presuming the performances are good and your mixing environment is free from
any major problems, it's best to get a rough mix together by putting up the instruments (bass, guitars, keys, etc.), vocals, and drums. Don't worry about panning the
drum tracks, just center them all for an essentially mono signal. If you have stereo
overheads or room mics, see if you can play them back as mono by setting the
track's properties or using a plug-in.

With all the tracks playing, pull each of the drum tracks up and down in volume.
Once you can recognize each track's contents, adjust them up or down until they
sound the best they can in the mix, without any additional reverb, EQ, gating or
compression. Now let's isolate the drums, either by soloing them, or muting the
other instruments and vocals. The resulting sound should sound very similar to how
the drums originally sounded in the room, aside from the mono perspective.
If there is washy, chorus-effected character to the sound, you're probably having
phase cancellation issues. These are usually caused by having mics receiving the
same signal at varied distances. This can put the polarity of the soundwaves out of
alignment, which can degrade an otherwise well-recorded track.
To identify the culprits, start by soloing up just the left and right overhead tracks. If
you still hear any weirdness, try flipping the phase on one of the tracks. If it subsides and sounds a bit fuller and punchier, you've fixed it.
If they already sound good or sound better now, add the snare drum. If you have
both a top and bottom mic on the snare, start with the top one. Do the symptoms
return? If so, reverse the phase on that track. If it sounds fine until the bottom mic is
added, flip the phase on that track. You may have to try a couple of combinations,
but you should be able to get it to sound noticeably better.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2016