To compress overheads or not to compress overheads? Again, this processing isn’t on the overheads, but if I add EQ or compression on the drum buss it will influence the sound of the overheads. From this point, I actually treat the entire drum buss before getting into any individual captures. Stylistically this can definitely work sometimes, but I’d say 75% of the time I want something a little more live and deep.īut wait, we’re still not onto the overheads yet. Super wide, super close overheads usually makes me feel like I’m either listening to something artificial or I’m in a living room with the drummer. Wide overheads also feel very forward, which can be great, but sometimes we want the drums (cymbals in particular) to sit a hair back in the front-to-back imaging.įor me, this creates a sense of depth and an overall bigger mix. It’s a little counterintuitive but sometimes getting the widest sounding mix actually means pulling the drum overheads into the center a bit. On the subject of imaging and width it’s worth noting that sometimes the cymbals can mask the guitars if they have a wide stereo field. Now, again, if we are using the overheads mainly for cymbals it’s not quite as important if the snare and kick have a focused center, in which case I may opt to leave the imaging as is. For this, I can either zoom in on the waveform and simply line them up visually, or I can use a program like SoundRadix Auto-Align. We can do this by tightening up the timing of the overheads, using the snare drum as our focus. If a lot disappears we may want to sacrifice a bit of stereo width in order to get a tight center. Checking the mono fold and seeing how much of the snare and kick we lose can be pretty revealing. This means having a really solid phase relationship particularly in regards to the snare. The hardest part of overheads is getting a sound that’s both wide and has a solid center. I find a linear phase EQ is usually good for this process. When we only want the cymbals, it may be worth high-passing the overheads to drop out the kick and body of the snare. People who want an unrealistically close and clean sound will usually go primarily for the cymbals, whereas those who want a more natural sense of the drums will grab the whole kit. Just depends on the style of music and particular tastes of the band. When I track overheads I’m usually trying to record the entire kit, but there are some tracking engineers who are really only looking to grab the cymbals. Then there’s a bit that varies depending on exactly what’s happening in the context of the music.įirst I listen to what’s there to determine what my overheads are bringing to the table. For me there’s a bit of procedure that doesn’t vary - I do the same thing essentially every time. The trickiest part of this tricky instrument is the overheads.
Drums are generally tricky to both record and mix.
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