A quick extra post about the drums.  I thought, just for fun, I’d give you  a flavour of before and after the processing to add the new kick and snare drums.  These audio samples are from the start of Fantasy Bridge.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Raw drums.

This first example is pretty much what was recorded.  There is a bit of EQ and compression, and I’ve mixed the levels to get a balance to the kit.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Drums with new kick and snare

This example uses the Steven Slate samples (In this case a Pearl kick drum and what they describe as the Led Zep snare) each sampleset has multiple samples and a round-robin algorithm that chooses a slightly different sample on each hit as well as different samples depending on drum hit velocity.  This helps keep the augmented drums pretty natural sounding.

Currently I’m working on the drums for A Day By the Sea, and I got an email from Nick today saying that he is working on the Day by the Sea guitar solo. I’m really looking forward to that!

… When It’s another drum, recorded by someone else.

Yes, the magic of drum replacement.

Well. As I hinted in the previous mail, it turns out that my drum recording skills leave something to be desired, which means that I have not quite realised my vision of awesome rock drums recorded in a big room. To be honest, the kick drum tracks sound a little like a cardboard box, and the snare just lacks that snap that cuts through the mix.  Luckily, I have some pretty neat performances from Paul, and now I’ve pretty much edited out the odd bum hit, corrected the odd timing error with Logic’s Flex Audio feature, and comped the drum tracks on 6 of the 7 tracks, I’ve turned my attention to drum replacement.

Now while I might not have the requisite mics or years of experience in  placing them, or thousands of pounds worth of mic preamps, converters and what have you, Steven Slate has all these things, and a drop dead gorgeous collection of the best drums ever made, which he’s meticulously recorded to 24 track tape in a pro studio with the best mics available, processed with some wonderful high end outboard, converted with some high end D-A and created a set of drum samples that are in demand from some of the hottest  producers out there.

So, on to Logic’s Drum replacement facility. Well, I read the manual, I watched some tutorials, and it looks quite simple.  In fact, this Youtube video makes it look so easy:

Right!

What I found was that the ‘Threshold’ control actually seems to have an almost random effect on which hits to choose and which to ignore.  Meaning that to ensure that you get all the hits that are real drum hits, you get lots of ghost notes where the replacer has chosen to trigger off a bit of bleed-through from another drum at a much lower level.

In the end the solution was to insert a noise gate, gate the track really heavily to get only the drum hit you are after, and then bounce the track to a temporary track which the drum replacement algorithm can work on.  In other words: it’s taking ages!

But we’re getting there. I’ve been burning the midnight oil, and all but A Day by the Sea are done…  And I think the final result is turning out to be rather tasty.

Well, the drumming is pretty much done.  Last Saturday Paul and I spent the whole day recording drums.

Starting early I got to the venue at around 9:30 and set up the Alesis mixer and laptop, then patched the outputs from the big Yamaha MG32 into the Alesis (I think the Yamaha preamps are nicer, and it also meant I could take advantage of the floorboxes routed to the Yamaha to aid the micing up)

We set up Paul’s kit and I set about positioning the mics.  By the time we were ready to record it was about 11:30.   From then till 7:00 we were recording non-stop by which time we had the 7 tracks that feature real drums in the can.

For the nerdy amongst you the mics were D112 on Kick, Audio Technica AT4021 on overheads, Shure SM57 on the Snare, Samson C02 on the hat and another on the ride, SM58s on the toms and a pair of Rode M3s for the room.

So now I have 12 tracks of drums for each of the 7 songs to go through, I intend to edit out the silence between hits on the toms and the ride, to clean up the bleed-through.  I also discovered that for whatever reason the snare mic was overloading on louder hits, so I’m looking at a combination of audio restoration to remove the spikes, and replacing (or augmenting) the snare hits with samples.  I might also do the same for the kick to give it some more snap, and potentially the toms in places too. Logic has a built-in Drum replacement/augmentation facility that detects transients on a track and assigns a MIDI not to the default drum note for the drum you have selected.  It then opens the ESX24 sampler and loads a set of samples for the drum you have selected.

Lots and lots to do. Fun, Fun, Fun!

A somewhat action packed edition of the blog today folks.

First off: Guitars.  Andy came over the other Friday and brought his rather nice Yamaha acoustic, and his even nicer American Stratocaster.  I miked up the Yamaha with a Samson CO2 Small Diameter Condenser mic set about 18″ (45cm) from the soundboard pointing at about the 12th fret.  Got a really nice sound.  Anyway, we tracked the acoustic guitar parts for A Day by the Sea and Together on the Shores of Time.  Then we moved to the Strat, which I DI’d directly into the DAW, and then using Logic’s Amp Designer I selected the Large Tweed Combo which is modelled from a classic Fender Tweed amp.  This was used to great effect on the rock section of A Day by the Sea.  I’m really pleased with it.

Also on the Guitar front Nick has agreed to do me another solo, this time the guitar solo in the 6/8 instrumental section of A Day by the Sea.  I  sent him links to the section in question, and the whole song, and he’s going to get to work on it.

Next up: Bass.Adam was in Tracking some alternative bass parts for A Day by the Sea, because we agreed that what we had worked out last time could be improved on.  This time we came up with some really outstanding bass parts, and it has lifted the arrangement to another level.  We also tracked about 70% of the bass for Children of a Forgotten Sun before we ran out of time.  We have another session booked for this coming Friday so that should see all the bass in the can.

Finally for today: Drums. Paul is booked in for an all day session on the first Saturday in March.  This will be a fun day.  I’ve booked a Church building for the day, which has some killer acoustics – It’s a large vaulted ceiling building which would seat up to 300 people but it is carpeted and the chairs are upholstered.  This gives a space which has a nice  reverb tail but isn’t overly lively.  I reckon that we can get a great drum sound in there.  I also have access to a fair selection of mics – D112 Kick mic, Audio Technica AT4021 overheads, Shure SM57 for the Snare, Rode M3 for the hi-hat and another for the floor tom.  and my Samson C02 pair for the rack toms.  I’ll also take my Groove Tubes GT57 Large Capsule condenser for the ambience mic.

I have installed Logic onto the Macbook pro, and I’ll be taking the Alesis Multimix to interface it all to the computer.  I’ve recorded a drum kit in that space before and was please with the results, but this will be the first time with my own gear, so it’s all going to be a bit of an adventure.

This is the big push to get the final bits of tracking done.  I still have Sue’s electric violin part to get for Ode to Joy, but I can now see the end in sight for the tracking.