And don’t get too obsessed with aligning your tracks – they might sound better messy! Remember that you can typically only align one drum (the snare is your best bet), as the timing offsets will vary due to each piece of the kit being at different distances from the mics. In our example audio files, a subtle increase in low-end solidity can be created by moving the snare bottom mic channel back into time by about 4ms, so that the ‘meat’ of the waveform becomes a little bit more neatly aligned with that of the snare top mic channel. You may be able to manually adjust the timing of the recordings in order to improve their combined sound. However, too much can sap punch, power and clarity. This is part of the sound of recorded drums, and it can help to create some cool tones as well as smoothen sharp transients. Just a phaseīecause a drum hit will take slightly longer to reach the overhead mics than it does the drum’s own close mics, its timing will be slightly smeared across the channels.
The same trick can be used to add sheen to hi-hats and even – using a sine wave – sub-bass to kick drums. Keep the level of the fake ‘wires’ low in the mix, and be aware that it might need muting during fills. Key the sidechain from your snare track and set the gate threshold and envelope parameters so that the synth only triggers when the snare hits, then fades out quickly and smoothly. Load any analogue synth with just a white noise oscillator active and tune it quite high.ĭraw in a single MIDI note for the duration of your drum track and insert a sidechainable gate plugin onto the synth’s mixer channel. If the wires on your snare drum aren’t making their presence felt strongly enough, white noise can be used to add a synthesised back-up layer. And if your overheads sound unexpectedly weird in any sense alongside the close mic channels, don’t forget to try flipping the phase. Two things to avoid with overheads, though, are overly heavy EQ boosts above 10kHz and compression (though a touch of compression can be effective for a vintage-style sound).
Overhead processingĪpplying a stereo widening plugin to the overheads channel can work wonders for the sense of breadth. Key a frequency-conscious gate from the snare to emphasise the airy overhead signal with each snare hit, or compress the overheads via the kick to draw the sides in with each kick hit. A range of cool effects can be created by putting a compressor/gate on the overheads channel and keying it from the kick, snare or hi-hats.
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