DRUM QUEST 2021 CONTINUES!
Those of you playing along at home might recall that my friend Charles recently gifted me with a drum kit out of the blue. Well, I set it up a couple of weeks ago to get going on some drum tracks I’m suddenly able to record for an album project, and I’ve been spending some time on mic setup.
Interestingly, the only mic visible here is misplaced— I’ve been toying with different placements of the “over the shoulder” mic in the classic Glyn Johns drum setup, and for a minute there I thought about raising it so it wouldn’t catch so much of the floor tom.
As it turned out, the resulting lack of floor tom signal was unsatisfying, and it appeared that a better solution would be to lower the mic again and a) mute the floor tom a bit, and b) figure out an EQ strategy to tame the more overwhelming frequencies of what should often be the final statement in a drum fill, but not crowd the rest of the audio document with unwelcome resonance.
I’m glad I spent so long messing with setup, using this particular song as the guinea pig in terms of material. The track I’m playing along with is very slow— the first performance everthing else accompanies was a solo acoustic guitar performance recorded about 20 years ago— and it wasn’t recorded to any kind of a metronome. The tempo probably varies widely over the course of the piece, though pleasingly so, and it’s proven challenging to play along with at full blast (which I think is the proper approach performance-wise on the drums). The strategy that’s worked best as I’ve proceeded is to take a pause before each impact, which generally keeps me on track with the original performance. And, you know, editing down the road will come in handy. Hahaha.
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