Recording Tips for Engineers, 4th Edition

Chapter Nine

The Starting Points

Drums

Ask yourself a few questions before getting the drum sounds. If you are bussing a lot of microphones to a few tracks, will you place a compressor or equalizer across the buss, or across each incoming signal? How many tracks do you have to work with? Should the panning be set from the listener’s perspective, or the drummer’s? How much processing should be used? Should you record any effects with the signal? Should you combine tracks? So many questions to be answered before the drummer sits down at the kit.

• What do you want? Determine in your head what sound you want to get before you go in and monkey around ...