Recording - January 2016 - 17

Now do the same thing with the kick drum. Again, if you
have more than one track dedicated to this, start with the outside
(or 'shell') mic's track and then the inside or 'beater' mic's track.
If you've made it this far, you're doing great, since those
can be the hardest problems to deal with. If you separately
miked the high-hat, add it in next. If that's the offender and still
is after flipping the phase, you might consider dropping it
lower in volume or taking it out altogether.
Stop the bleeding
Cymbals and other drums can leak into the toms and are
often a source of unwelcome coloration, due to their almost
immediate proximity and the fact that cymbals don't really
sound great when miked from underneath. Judicious gating is
often the best way to combat this in the short term, but I
believe close scrutiny should be paid to them subsequently, as
incorrectly set thresholds and releases on noise gates can introduce more problems than they solve.
When I run into toms that need gating or if I just want leaner
and cleaner sounding tracks, I prefer to do it manually within
my DAW. I locate each and every tom hit, cutting just a little
before the waveform's impact, to be sure to capture all the transients and even the 'wind' of the stick. I then solo the track and
listen to the tom (and possible cymbal bleed) ring out. I choose
the best "out point" and set a fade onto the waveform that
decays naturally, but gets out of the way as quickly as needed,
to retain a natural presence. (See Figure 1 at left.) Kick drums
that are floppy-sounding or have been miked from too far away
can also be "cleaned up" in this same fashion.
Once you've determined all is sounding good so far, room
mics can be added in one at a time. In these tracks, you're
looking not only for phasing, but flams and other delay-related
traits. Aside from the phase flipping, some corrections can be
accomplished by actually nudging the overhead tracks forward or backward in time in your DAW, albeit in very small
increments.
Now listen closely to the drums. Does the balance seem natural? Yes, the kick and snare should be slightly more prominent, but they should still sound pretty close. You may want to
apply some EQ to any drums that have buildups or deficiencies in certain frequency ranges, but be careful. Those offending frequencies may not be on the individual tracks, but in the
room or overhead mics. Double-check this by soloing or muting the drum in question and taking a listen.
After a bit of sweetening to the snare, kick, toms and overheads, you're ready to listen to the drums again in context
with the rest of the tracks. Sounding better, yes? There may be
some problem areas where certain tones are multiplying with
the drums. See if you can cut back these frequencies from
each of the offending tracks.

Now, let's pan for stereo! Keeping the snare and kick tracks
centered, place each overhead to the far left and far right. If
your room mic tracks are stereo, do this for them as well. Pan
the toms half that distance. Finally, place the hi-hat track where
it sounds most natural to you.
It seems like a lot of work just to get to this point, but at least
we can feel assured that we are assessing the clearest picture
of what the drums really sound like, which can save hours of
chasing one's proverbial tail. If you have multiple songs from
the same sessions, you get them to this point much more quickly by saving all EQ settings with names like
"High_Tom_EQ_14" and taking notes for each track's level
and pan position.

2
Caught in the snare
In most pop music forms, the kick and snare drums are the
focus of a track's rhythm, which calls a lot of attention toward
them-especially on the backbeat, which is primarily the
snare's domain. That satisfying punctuation is waited for and
welcomed over and over by the listener throughout a single
playback of a song, making its presence even more notable
and its role that much more crucial. Perhaps due to this added
importance, many different strategies have been developed to
better the snare's sound.
The White Noise technique, for example, was widely used
on snares in the '80s and is still in use today, although in a
more subtle way. It's usually employed when you have only a
top mic or if the bottom mic is unusable.
Start by setting up a track or bus with a noise gate on it, set
to a very high threshold. Set up the gate to be triggered by the
existing snare drum. With either a synth or a white noise generator, fill this track with white noise or copy and paste a
RECORDING January 2016

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