Audioslave Technique

[ddwhitney]

I hope I am not being too redundant..

Whether people realize it or not, phase is a natural component of the auditory experience. If you somehow figure out how to remove it completely it will leave a very unnatural feeling. What you should strive to do is minimize the negative aspects of excessive phase where cancellation is occurring for instance.

If your close mic'ing you could align hits to the grid and be fairly successful, but once you add overheads at any distance all bets are off. There are simply too many overtones and frequency bands in the overheads to "align" them without disrupting the phase with the close mics.

Part of the issue is that the human brain uses significant amounts of real time processing for identifying sounds in frequency, space and time that a simple A/D converter cannot do.

One of the ways to reduce phasing is thru eq. Phase is a differential of an identical frequency, so reducing the frequencies where the phasing occurs is the easiest method for cleaning things up after you've got a head start by proper mic and kit positioning.

Which goes back to kit location... what type of acoustic treatment gives you the best drums sound?

What kind of room?

Big room with a lot of high frequency diffusion, reflection or absorption?

How does the room impact mic choice?

[jdutaillis]

Originally Posted by ddwhitney

One of the ways to reduce phasing is thru eq.

Using EQ will introduce phasing as well however. But you're right in that it may be the lesser of two evils when applied. You can always use a linear phase EQ for this kind of work though.

[DrFord]

both ddwhitney and jdutaillis have excellent points. This would be the evolution of the EQ which brings us into linear phase EQ's (usually found in mastering chains - now used more and more in mixing due to ADC and faster computers) as they induce less phasing and thusly a more "clean" sound.

This whole arguement really does boil down to micing techniques and choice when recording drum sets. I have heard excellent drums from 4 mics (2 OH 1 kik 1 snr) and I have heard really BAD drums from 16 mics when people didn't know what they were doing.

If we take out of the equation mic availability, room treatment, room size, cables, mic pres, and converters... (stay with me) you would find that you could attack micing a drumset specifically for the genre of music you are producing / engineering. An example here could be that when ?uestlove was producing the Rev. Al Green's latest album (2006?), quest was trying very hard to capture the mix of Al's original records, with drums taken from todays Hip Hop and R&B records, except played live and recorded instead of sampled.

What he did was actually invite bleed from instruments playing in the same room (band at once recording) to achieve a more 70's period sound and mix, and then record the drums seperately and isolated, then treat the individual drum recordings very detailed to get a the Hip Hop sound. I believe their approach was to use heavy heavy compression on the drums to emulate the sound of a mastered drum sound being resampled and then remastered and just becoming right out squashed. It was a very interesting article.

This isn't the article I was refering to but was the only one I could find that was barely relevant.
http://www.pastemagazine.com/article...-uestlove.html

[O.G. Killa]

Originally Posted by DrFord

This whole arguement really does boil down to micing techniques and choice when recording drum sets. I have heard excellent drums from 4 mics (2 OH 1 kik 1 snr) and I have heard really BAD drums from 16 mics when people didn't know what they were doing.

So very true... case in point, I had to mix a song for a band (who shall remain nameless) signed to Dreamworks Records (back when Dreamworks were in business). They supposedly went to a very expensive and well-known studio and hired a well known sound engineer for the tracking (although, I've never heard of the guy, I looked up his name and he has worked on a lot of records, to my amazement). The tracking engineer had 25 mics on the drumset and I could tell he never checked for comb filtering between any of them. It was a mess.

It appeared that he put an overhead mic up for each cymbal (so there were 6 or 7 overhead mics as this was a somewhat Prog Rock band with a big drumset), Then he had what sounded like regular overheads as a pair, each drum (including 5 toms), two on the snare (didn't flip the polarity of the bottom mic), two on the kick, 3 stereo room mics and a mono room mic.

All of the cymbal mics sounded like they were placed kind of high up, so if you tried to use any of them, they started getting very noticeable phase interference (comb filtering) with each other and the drum sounds. NONE of the stereo room mics nor the overheads (which weren't labeled as overheads, they were just labeled with the name of the mic used) were centered. When turning each pair on, the drums were ALWAYS hard right, almost as though the drummer was on the right side of the room, but the room mics were just setup in the corners and the preamp levels set so they were identical on the knob (without ever listening to the image/balance). And the close mics sounded like they were all SM57s.

I kept track of my time... it took me 6 (yes SIX) hours just to sort through all the drum tracks and find a combination that could work. Out of the 25 mics, I ended up using 7 or 8 of them.

And then I had to move on to the TEN tracks of Bass Guitar. Not 10 different bass parts, but 10 tracks of the exact same bass part recorded various ways, with various basses (acoustic and electric), through various pieces of gear. And then the song only had something like 2 guitar tracks that were only doing these light semi distorted arppegiated things with tons of delay on them and one vocal track... lol. Talk about trying to make something out of nothing!!! LOL

[jmitchell1532]

Why do I have a feeling, just based on the description, that I could name that band...

OG is certainly a miracle worker. Yikes.

[crizdee]

Hi,

One of the reasons i bought a UAD card was for this plugin..

http://www.uaudio.com/products/software/ibp/index.html

Look at it as a bad micing fixing tool

Chris

[Darney]

[QUOTE=O.G. Killa;1472846]

Tell you what... the posts here from Dr. Ford and O.G. are priceless! If readers pay attention to what they're saying, they'll get an education that you can't buy ANYWHERE for any amount of money.

Massive kudos to both of these pros.