As detailed in my ‘Recording Starts: Drum Recording’ post, the drums were something that I wanted to get right in order to replicate ambience on Absolution (LO3).

I feel that while the session went well and I got what I wanted, with time to spare at the end, there are a few things I would have liked to change. For one thing, I feel that the kick drum could have been much better in terms of tone, and it could have been easier to record. The drum kit we used didn’t have a hole in the front kick drum skin, meaning that the microphone had to sit outside the drum. This meant that there was a lot of bleed from the other instruments. Another thing that I found challenging was finding a nice snare sound. I’m not completely happy with the snare drum on the EP and it needed a lot of processing to get it to where it is.

The room sound, however, exceeded my expectations. Below is an image of how we set the drum microphones up.

This was all fairly conventional, save for the lack of hi-hat microphone. I only had 8 channels at my disposal which meant unfortunately the hi-hat mic had to be sacrificed in order to have the last channel free for the room mic. This turned out to be a good decision as the hi-hats were picked up adequately by the overheads.

Here’s an image of the room mic position I ended up using:

By positioning the microphone so low down I avoided picking up too much resonance from the overheads. The wall shown had a nice natural reverb to it and so I decided that positioning the microphone there produced the best ambient sound. I wanted to use a room sound for my reverb in order to replicate the method used by Rich Costey. “Another reason for the tight sound may be that I don’t tend to use much reverb on things like drums when I’m mixing. I pretty much just used whatever ambience was to be found on the room mics”

I also tried removing the panels on the walls to further enhance the ambience of the room, but decided that it might be a little difficult to control in the mixing stage.

Below are some of the more unsuccessful attempts at finding a room sound including near the door, out of the door with the door open, and out of the door with the door closed (attempting to get a sound out of the lobby)

Overall I’m quite happy with my drum sound although there are certainly elements that could have been better. I think that following Rich Costey’s philosophy on Absolution has meant that I’ve got natural sounding drums, similar at least in terms of ambience.