Sound Advice : Recording
When recording a drum part, do I have to EQ it, or should it be left untreated?
There’s
no hard-and-fast rule when it comes to treating your drum recordings
(or not!). If you get a really good-quality source recording, you may
not need to EQ it at all.
Samuel Am, via email
SOS
Reviews Editor Matt Houghton replies: There’s no right or wrong answer
to this question! As long as the drum sounds right to you when played
through your studio monitors, use whatever you need to get the result
you want: compression, EQ, Transient Designer or, in the case of a snare
drum, perhaps even a tiny bit of distortion.
Back
in the days of big-budget studio recordings, many engineers would — if
they felt it was needed — EQ and compress drum mics on the mixing
console while recording, and then print the results to multi-track tape
for mixing. Today, it’s easy to capture a clean recording and add EQ or
other processing to taste at the mixing stage, using plug-ins. This
leaves more options open to you, and avoids you getting stuck with poor
EQ and dynamics decisions that don’t suit the mix, but it also means
that you’re putting off decisions, so the whole process can take longer.
If
you’re new to this, I’d recommend experimenting first with mic choice
and placement to get the best sound possible. Then add EQ and/or
compression during the mix stage if you feel it’s needed for the
particular track in question. In the long run, you’ll end up with better
results if you start working in this way, and eventually your EQ and
dynamics decisions will become second nature, at which point it will be
easy to make them during recording rather than mixing.
Of
course, depending on the style of the song, it’s also perfectly
possible to record a natural-sounding drum part with no processing
whatsoever, just relying on mic choice and placement (and
a good-sounding drum and room, and a good drummer!) to capture a clean
sound.
As for which mics to pick, it really
depends on the drum(s) you’re using: what you use on a kick or snare
close-mic can be very different from what you use for overheads or
hand-drums. 0
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