The Secrets of Wizkid Sound – Part II: Recording Drums

This is a continuation of “The Secrets of Wizkid Sound – Part I: Pre-Production“

Weak-ass engineers are always wondering how Wizkid Sound gets those bombastic drum sounds. They keep asking questions like:

“Hey how come you guys’ drums sound like thunder and mine sound like a static electricity shock?”

or

“Why is Chris Lord-Alge always trying to get you guys’ drum sounds and he can’t even come close”

or

“Can I ride around in you guys’ Rolls Royce Corniche just for a second.” (The answer is no).

But if you follow these exact directions, you will soon be driving your own Corniche.

Preparation

Cutting good sounding drums can be a very tricky and complicated process. It’s best to be prepared and carefully write down and keep track of what you are doing (especially when dealing with multiple mics, preamps, and interface inputs). Planning the whole process out will make everything go much smoother, and result in a much better product. Be sure you have everything you need and know exactly how you are going to hook everything up BEFORE the session, so you don’t waste much time on technical details while the band or artist is ready to get going.

Get Your Room Right

Most people don’t have the luxury of cutting drums in multi-million dollar live rooms designed by acoustic experts with Ph.Ds in Badassery. But the cool thing is that you can make pretty much any room work as long as you make a few adjustments to minimize bad room sounds and maximize any good reflections and reverb you may have.

I don’t have enough room to discuss proper treatment for every room size, configuration, and building material but there is some great info on this site by the multi-talented Ethan Winer. Once you understand the basics of acoustics you should be able to come up with a good plan for treating your room that fits your budget.

Get Your Instrument Right

Before you ever put a mic up to any instrument (including vocals) you need to make sure you’ve got a good quality sound from the source itself. You’ll hear this repeated throughout all of our articles on instrument tracking. You can make lower quality instruments sound “alright” with some mixing magic, but you can’t make them sound “freaking amazing.” At Wizkid, “freaking amazing” is all we do.

Get the best quality drums you have access to for recording. The kit should also match the music style if you can help it (big boomy kick, toms, and loud snare for rock, or smaller kit with more tone for jazz, and so forth). It’s always best to get brand new skins for your snare and toms (if the drummer can afford it). New heads resonate more and have richer harmonics than old ones. You need more of this tone because it normally isn’t conveyed through mics as well as it is in the live room.

You also need to tune the drums up to themselves (for the best sounding resonance) and to each other (for even sounding fills and rolls). Drum tuning isn’t a perfect science, but it does take some experience. A lot of drummers really can’t do it properly, so it pays to learn a few basic techniques. For more info, check out this article on Wikipedia.

Getting the proper cymbals for the music is also very important. There’s no right or wrong combination, but generally you want a couple of differently toned crashes, a nice ride, and decent high hats (Note: Splashes and Chinas sound like shit, both on a recording and in real life. Please let the drummer know this if he owns either of these pieces of shit). It’s also a good idea to use cymbals that aren’t as bright especially in small rooms. Cymbals that are a bit dirty and greasy are actually better for recording. Harsh cymbals tend to overpower and wash out the other drums in your overheads, and can also cause a lot of phase problems in the higher frequencies.

Get Your Mics Right

There are lots of different mics designed for lots of different applications, but with any instrument, there is no one right or wrong mic to use. A typical drum setup consists of two cardioid condensers for overheads, cardioid dynamics on the snare and toms, a large diaphragm dynamic or condenser on the kick, and any number of mics to capture the room sound. Here’s what we typically use:

Kick: AKG D112 inside, Shure SM7 or Neumann FET 47 outside
Snare: Heil PR20
Toms: Sennheiser 421
Overheads: Rode NT2 Stereo pair
Rooms: SM57s (these just happen to sound good in our room)
Trash mic: Radio Shack something or another.

Again, this is just what works for us. We always like to experiment to see what mics and mic placement might improve our tracks. Try out whatever you have at your disposal and see what works for your particular setup.

Once you’ve placed your mics, get someone to tap the mics to make sure you’ve got a signal coming from all your mics into your DAW and all the tracks are labeled correctly. This will save you a lot of headaches in the editing and mixdown process.

Get Your Input Right

Drums sound different through mics than they do live. You want to make sure each mic is getting the best sound from its intended target before recording. Spend some time getting the drummer to play each drum individually so you can see what the mic is picking up. If necessary, make some adjustments to get a richer sound from each drum. Also have the drummer play the whole kit to see how everything interacts and get the overhead and room mic levels even.

One of the biggest problems you will encounter recording drums is phase cancellation. Any time you have more than one microphone recording the same source you can have phase issues, but with drums you have LOTS of mics, all receiving sounds at different times. This article gives some good advice on fixing phase problems and mic placement. [As a starting point, if you have a pair of mics, for example snare top and bottom or a pair of overhead mics, hit the phase switch on your mic pre and see if it sounds better. Ed.]

Get Your Drummer’s Mix Right

Drummers like to hear different things in their headphone mix than other musicians.  They generally need the click track and the scratch track loud (if you recall, these should already be set up). If you have to, set up a separate cue headphone mix for the drummer so he can get everything he needs to play on rhythm comfortably. This link shows you how to do this in Pro Tools but every major DAW can do it.

You should also have some good “closed ear” headphones that seal off the drummer’s ears from the loudness of the kit so he can hear the mix better. A decent set, like the Sennheiser HD280s can get loud without distorting and totally seal off outside noise.

Get Your Drummer Right

If you’ve done pre-production correctly, the drummer should have his parts ready and already be well practiced to the scratch track and the click. If he isn’t, yell at him. Just kidding. If you need to, run through the song so he can get used to the recording setup.

For most rock stuff, you want the drummer to really hit the drums consistently and hard (that’s what she said), so that all the harmonics of the kit are released. The mics won’t pick up every single frequency the drums make, so you want to create as much frequency content as possible by really hitting them solidly. You can’t really make a bad drummer play good in one session, but you can coach them a little bit on the importance of solid consistent playing. It will have a big effect on the final product.

It’s best to get multiple takes of each song, especially of difficult parts. That way you can piece together the best takes for different parts. You also may want to try a different beat you aren’t so sure of, so keep some original takes too, and you can choose later. Regardless, make sure you have enough for at least one solid full take.

Get Your Session Right

When you are done recording a song, get the drummer and band (or artist) together to help you piece together takes, if need be. Make sure everyone is happy with what with the final version before you start doing any further editing or lining up. This keeps you from wasting time later by editing and lining up takes that the drummer didn’t want to use in the first place.

Also, ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR SESSION FREQUENTLY while cutting drums. You should be backing up all the time anyway, but drums are especially important for two reasons. First, recording so many tracks at one time can sometimes be taxing on your system and make it more liable to crash. Secondly, re-cutting drums is a huge freaking pain in the ass. Protecting recording sessions is your responsibility, so take it seriously. It would be wise to invest in a separate backup hard drive and software like Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Check out our article on Creating a Backup Routine.

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