DRUM! - Plugged In

Gear

Four E-Drums From The Stone Age

What was once considered fashionable somehow become an embarrassment after a few years pass. In this article, Mike Snyder looks at three electronic percussion instruments that seemed like a great idea back in the day.

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Workshop: Monitoring For Control Freaks

For the past ten years I've worked as an electronic drum clinician. This line of work led me to the early conclusion that a portable in-ear system is a must have. Especially since every clinic has a different sound system quality — ranging from excellent to downright painful. But with so many in-ear monitoring options currently on the market, where does one start? As it happens, the question that determines the answer to that is simpler: why does one start?

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Studio Drumming In The Age Of Pro Tools

The art of recording has seen steady refinement since Thomas Edison first unveiled the phonograph in 1877. From the priciest of world-class recording facilities down to the bedroom project studio, today’s digital audio workstations (DAWs) have opened up amazing avenues of quality, efficiency, and flexibility to the recording process. By combining dedicated software, hardware, and an audio interface in a personal computer or laptop, DAWs put pro quality recording within reach of almost anybody who wants it.

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Recording Tip: Boost Your Djembe’s Lows

If you’re looking to enhance the low end of a djembe on your next recording, try this technique that microphone maven Karl Winkler shared with me. The idea is to emulate a boundary microphone setup with a quality omnidirectional small-diaphragm condenser to achieve amazing low-frequency results. This approach works really well with hand drums, such as a djembe, but you could certainly use it for bass drums or anything else with low bass.

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Fix It Before The Mix: 10 Tips For Sound Design

Recording music on a computer can easily lead to option paralysis. The number of ways you can edit your work is essentially infinite. When a track is almost working, but not quite, you can spend days tweaking things without getting any closer to sonic nirvana.

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Onstage Drum Miking Techniques

Having a firm grip on appropriate mike selection and placement will serve you well on a live gig – whether you’re doing it yourself or trying to convey your needs to the sound engineer at the venue. Awareness of room acoustics, system dynamics, musical genre, and your drum set’s individual characteristics also come into play when plugging in. In this article we’ll explore the fundamentals of getting a good onstage drum sound.

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Snaring The Killer Snare Drum Sound

From delicate brushwork to bombastic rim-shots, the snare drum’s wide dynamic range fills out the frequency spectrum between the cymbals and the bass drum. It’s important for the recording as a whole that you snare the perfect snare sound because it greatly influences the overall sound. Simply changing out the snare drum on a tune or processing it just a bit can have a dramatic effect.

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Roy Mayorga’s Studio Miking Techniques

Ask a drummer to whip out a rudiment, and be prepared for a barrage of notes to fly your way within nanoseconds. Ask a drummer to describe the best array of microphones and mike placement techniques to best capture drum sounds in the studio and expect a confused puppy dog look — from everybody from Roy Mayorga, that is. In this video Stone Sour’s basher gives us a tour of his microphone choices and explain the mike placement he employed while recording the band’s upcoming release Audio Secrecy.

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B.T.’s Drumming, Mixing, And Editing Tips

When it comes to manipulating drum tracks, nobody does it better than BT (a.k.a Brian Transeau), the Guinness World Record holder for the most edits in a recorded piece of music (6,178 to be precise). His audio-production and editing skills are legendary, but don’t let that scare you: BT’s methods, insanely complex as they are at times, can be applied to a wide variety of styles and recording situations. Here he provides three drum-related mixing tips and tricks to make your track come alive.

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Enhancing The E-Kit Experience

Let’s see if this sounds familiar: A little while ago, you bought an electronic drum kit, justifying the purchase by reviewing all the very cool things that you can do with an electronic kit that simply aren’t possible with an acoustic kit. Fast-forward a couple of months and there’s a nice layer of dust on the data entry buttons, knobs, wheels, and faders. This article will help prod you to move out of your preset comfort zone into an unexplored realm of unique creative possibilities, greater personal expression, and enough stylistic variety to keep your boundaries expanding ever outward.

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Top Ten Free Music Software Downloads

There’s never been a better time to make music on a computer. All you need is a decently fast machine with a large hard drive, some non-cheesy audio I/O hardware, an Internet connection, and some patience. If you’ve got all that, you don’t need to spend a nickel on high-priced commercial programs — great music software is available for free.... MORE »

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How To Mike Percussion On Stage

Every percussionist possesses a fat arsenal of instruments -- some are hit, others are scraped, and still others are shaken. And depending on the peculiarities of a particular instrument, the technique you use to mike and amplify its sound is often unique. In this exhaustive workshop, Karen Stackpole takes the mystery out of onstage percussion miking.... MORE »