Kick Drum: Sine Wave Triggering vs. Sound Replacement
Well again, you must decide what works best for yourself. Even though we are in times of advanced sound replacement tools with names like Digidesigns, Soundreplacer or Drumagog, don’t turn your back on old techniques, like utilizing the side-chain key inputs on your dynamics units. It can sound more natural and subtle and introduces less phasing.
To achieve this in Pro Tools, for example, just insert the signal generator on one track with a sine wave of the Kick Drum’s fundamental or desired frequency. That could be between 45-80 Hz. Then insert a gate with side-chain capabilities. Make a split of the kick drum signal itself and gate it accordingly. Use the original kick signal for the key input on the signal generator track and gate it really fast with a decay of about 45-80 ms depending on the music. Buss the gated signal generator track and the gated kick drum split signal onto a new Aux Buss and apply compression. Balance everything properly and there you go.
Overheads: X/Y vs. A/B
Both techniques have advantages and disadvantages. A/B exhibits a wide stereo image over the drum kit and X/Y is very phase accurate. On the other hand, A/B introduces phasing issues due to the time arrival difference and you can’t apply the 3:1 rule over the entire drum kit.
What can you do to get the best out of both worlds? I assume you are familiar with the 3:1 rule. The problem zone on a drum kit is the centre signal, mainly the snare. The trick is to keep the snare in phase by making use of the time arrival difference. Measure the distance for the snare skin to each mic. You could even use a microphone lead for that. And don’t worry if it looks a bit funny to you. Most likely the overhead mic above the ride cymbal is much lower positioned than the one above the hi hat. This will keep your snare phase accurate and for the outer parts of the kit the 3:1 rule kicks in. What you achieve from this is a wide stereo field due to the A/B setup and minimized phasing issues where it matters, at the centre of the drum kit.
And the X/Y technique? People often complain about the lack in stereo width. But X/Y doesn’t just work with a 90 degree setup. Try widening the angle to get more side signal and lower the mic position a bit. This will give you a much wider stereo image with no phasing issues on the overheads whatsoever. The X/Y technique works well for angles from 60-135 degrees.
At the end of the day you must use what works best for what you want to achieve. Have a bit of a think before you start recording and know what sort of sound you are going for.
Pro Tools Delay Compensation
As most of the users know, Pro Tools LE and M-Powered don’t support plugin delay or latency compensation. This is particularly annoying for phase sensitive material like drums and percussion, and on parallel compression. What can you do about it? Use the onboard delay and sit there with a calculator throughout the entire mixing process? You still may not achieve the desired effects. Screw that! Fortunately there’s a nifty tool from Mellowmuse called ATA. It is a ping based delay compensation plugin which gets inserted on the individual track before any other plugin, as well as on the busses and masterbuss. Just ping the clients from the master buss and the time based compensation adjusts automatically. You can even implement Outboard Gear if you wish. Well, 10 points from my side to that invention. Even the price is right. Here is the website: http://www.mellowmuse.com/ATA.html
Achieve fast trigger on kick drum with hardware gates
If you’re tired of slow reaction times of hardware gates chopping off the transients on your kick drum try this.. Set up 2 microphones on your kick drum. One right behind the skin were the beater hits and the other one in a sweet spot with a lot of low end. This could even be outside of the kick drum itself. Make a signal split of your mic which sits just behind the beater and use the side-chain input of the gate for the low-end "sweet spot" mic. Set the attack time as low as you can. This assures, due to the speed of sound, that the reaction time is faster and you get more transient signal for your sweet spot mic. Now, take out all the lows and low-mids of the "trigger" microphone behind the beater and balance that with the low-end mic for a nice punchy Metal Kick Drum.
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