The first thing that we did when we got into the studio was set up the drum kit. The studio kit was set up so it was looking down the room lengthways. Like this:
This gives a very bright and vibrant sound with lots of projection as there is a lot of room in front of the drum kit. We decided to set my drum kit up in the room widthways, so I was facing the control room. Like this:
This had quite a big effect on the sound of the drums. Instead of having lots of projection (which is great for a live setting) they were a lot punchier and in your face which is perfect for our style of music. The drums also sounded a bit less resonant which was the sound we were going for. I wanted my drums to sound similar to how Royal Blood’s sounded just with a bit more life.
^ this is an example of how I wanted my drums to sound on the EP
The high ceilings also helped massively with the drum sound. High ceilings in a studio make drums sound livelier and give the cymbals a lot of room to reflect. In other words, big rooms make the drums sound just like the room, big. This was ideal for our sound as we wanted the drums to have life but didn’t want to sound like they were being played in an arena.
The next thing we did was set up all of the mics to record on the drums. For an in-depth look at the microphones I used and why, see my gear page under the drums tab. In short, we had two overhead mics to mainly pick up the two crash cymbals, a hi-hat mic, a mic on the ride to give it more definition, a tom mic, a floor tom mic, a snare batter head mic and a snare resonant head mic, a kick drum close mic and a kick drum far mic, two ribbon room mics level with the floor, a condenser room mic set up right in front of the kit.
After we set all of the microphones up we then soundchecked the drums. This was to make sure that we could get all the drums balanced, they all sounded good, and there were no issues either with the drums or the microphones. All of the mics were working and the drums were sounding good. Thanks to the drum dia I had purchased, my drums were all perfectly in tune and sounded really good. One problem was with my floor tom, although it was in tune and resonating beautifully, I had tuned it too high so it sounded like a mid tom instead of a floor tom. To fix this, I simply tuned down the resonant and batter heads by a quarter turn on each lug until it was giving the thumpy and deep sound that a floor tom should. It took a quarter turn anti-clockwise on each lug until the drum was sounding how we wanted. Once we had done that, it was back to soundchecking. Whilst sounchecking the entire kit, which involved me playing all the drums and cymbals, we noticed that the room was sounding a bit too dead. Because the live room at corner house studios has two big reflective windows, we closed the curtains on them hoping that it would kill unwanted reflections. However, when listening to the drums we decided that they were too dead and needed some life injected into them. To fix this, we simply opened the curtains half way so that there were some reflective surfaces in the room to make the drums reverberate a bit more. This solved the problem and the drums were sounding as I had hoped, I was very happy with how the drums were sounding raw and decided that we should go ahead with recording our two tracks.
We loaded up the tempo maps that I had created on logic, set up Liam’s guitar so that I could hear it through my headphones, and started tracking Bad Habit. The only things that were coming through my headphones were my drums, Liam’s guitar, and the metronome. Everything else I had to play off memory. The first two tracks were a bit shaky, I wasn’t happy with my performance. There were sections where I was going out of time and other times where I had technical inaccuracies such as missing beats and missing drums or cymbals. For the third take, we used the guitar track that Kurt, the engineer, had recorded from the second track. This way there was no chance of anything changing and the only variable was me. The third track was the best by far. I was stuck to the metronome and played exactly in time. We then decided to do a fourth take which was essentially the same as the third. That was the live drum tracks done for Bad Habit. I then had a break whilst Kurt took the best parts from each take and combines them into one master take. We decided to go with this process as it would save us time in the long run. Instead of continually tracking drums until I got a perfect take, it was a lot quicker to make a perfect take out of all of my live ones. I was completely happy to do this as it didn’t alter the sound of the drums, and it was still me playing, just different individual recordings of me playing. Once Kurt had finished this, we then recorded the drum takes to Smackhead. This was the same process as last time. I recorded four takes and we spliced them into one master track. I had a lot less trouble recording Smackhead. This is down to a couple of factors. I was a lot more settled in and comfortable in the studio than I was when we started recording Bad Habit as I was a bit nervous. Also, Smackhead is a much easier song than Bad Habit. There are fewer changes throughout the song both in tempo and structure. It is also essentially the same beat throughout until it gets to the breakdown section. I was happy with all of the takes of smackhead and therefore more confident that the drums would sound good on the song.
Overall, recording my drums was a relatively quick and painless process. We managed to get everything to do with my drums finished by around 3’oclock, which means we only spent around four hours recording them. Recording drums in the studio is completely different from playing live. In the studio, every little mistake will come through so you need to be very well rehearsed. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenging process of recording in a professional studio and it is definitely something I would hope to do again in my career. Because of these reasons, I think this was a succesful area of my project.