Session Notes

For this particular project, there was a little twist, in that I wasn’t tracking drums to fit a full musical composition. Instead, they’d be used in two ways. First, in addition to being a session musician, the drummer in question, Levi Szendro, is also a drum maker. One of his main aims was for me to catch the sound of his kit and playing for use on his web site. Second, my own main aim was to capture all the nuances of his kit in order to create a sample library — the post-production side of which will, if all goes to plan, form the basis of another SOS workshop in the not-too-distant future.

Making drums sound rich and full on their own, with no other musical accompaniment, is a very different prospect from tailoring them to fit alongside other instruments. In fact, in some respects it’s easier, as there are going to be no clashes with other instruments in terms of masking of frequencies. On the other hand, there’s nowhere to hide; if you get the sound wrong, the mistakes and embarrassments are there for everyone to hear! The sample-library side of the equation complicates matters, in that you have no idea what song anyone wants to use the library for, but you do know that it will need tweaking to fit various songs — and that means that you need to build in a certain amount of flexibility. Of course, unless you capture the sound of several alternative drums for each part of the kit, you’re going to be limited to some extent in what the library can do, but you can still experiment with the panning and levels of close-miked signals versus those from the room and overhead mics, and you can, if you wish, change the sound considerably by rigging more than one pair of overheads. Some further flexibility can be added in the post-production phase but, as I said earlier, that’s a subject for another day. For now, I’ll focus on some of the successes and difficulties of the recording session itself.

Another thing about tracking drums, in my experience, is that you really need to be able to hear clearly what you’re recording — and that means having reliable monitoring. While it’s relatively easy to find good or interesting rooms for recording, the monitoring side of things is tougher, and it’s no coincidence that my experiences of tracking drums on location when there’s no separate area to set up as a control room have so far failed to meet with my complete satisfaction. Headphones serve well enough for most things, but even when using them in a separate room (never mind trying to monitor in the same room as the kit!), I’ve yet to find a pair I’m happy to use to hear what’s going on with a kick drum — however good the cans are, they still leave me guessing a bit in this respect, and the kick sound is so important in so many styles. For many engineers, it’s the solid foundation around which a kit sound can be built.