Recording Drums To Click

[jordan_ellipsis]

Hi, I'm trying to do a bunch of recordings of different genres (rock, electronica etc) by myself in my garage room studio. When i say by myself i mean playing all the instruments to my own songs - not recording another band. Im not after excellent quality, mostly i just want to get ideas down, maybe present them to my band for us to play.

I have limited equipment, but i have a drum kit, a few mics, and an mbox. Anyway, getting to the point - i want to record the drums to a click track. Iv tried already to do this by creating a click track in a pro tools session and setting it to the loudest level. I then take a line from the headphone socket into an amp next to the kit. I plug headphones into that amp and bash away. Problem is, the beep beep beep isn't loud enough. Not nearly enough. With the amp up full and the aux track's level up full, and the mix dial turned fully to the right. The headphones i have are alright, but not top quality. Will a better, louder set of headphones solve this problem?


Also, i can hear the drums too much in the headphones even with that track muted on pro tools - why is this?

Thanks for any help ~ JD

[therecordinghouse]

get a new set of headphones with better isolation. specifically, ones designed for recording. i have sennheiser 280's, they work great. they run about $100. well worth it though.

[NickH]

Beyer DT100 or DT150's also work well for this...



N

[Naagzh]

Problem is, the beep beep beep isn't loud enough. Not nearly enough. With the amp up full and the aux track's level up full, and the mix dial turned fully to the right. The headphones i have are alright, but not top quality. Will a better, louder set of headphones solve this problem?


Also, i can hear the drums too much in the headphones even with that track muted on pro tools - why is this?

Thanks for any help ~ JD

Good headphones are a must, because once you get that click to be loud, it will want to bleed into your drum mics.

On the mBox, if you're using zero-latency recording, then I believe you must be monitoring directly from the Mbox (as opposed to monitoring the signal AFTER it gets into and out of PT). This is why you still hear drums while the tracks are muted. So, turn the knob from "monitor" to "playback". Not to worry, though, I doubt you'll notice any latency if you have your Hardware Buffer Rate set to 128 samples.

As for the click (now that you're monitoring through PT), you should be able to hear it fine.

[ericoutloud]

JD im assuming your monitoring your drums and the click in your headphones?? if so and your losing the level of the click, try this...create a master stereo track and adjusting the levels of your drums to the level of the click, then you can increase the master output track for even more level. the only other thing you could try is making a stereo track and name it headphone mix, then bus your other tracks to this one. you can also change the click to a different sound which may help(you may already know that?) good luck...
-e-

[Detuned6]

Check out the Extreme Isolation cans ($80) or the vic firth ones (around $50)

[cool_jazz]

Something I tried once, which worked OK was to use a pair of earbud type headphones with a pair of industrial ear muffs over the top (the plastic ones used for hearing protection). You probably don't need any drums at all in the headphones so turn the output all the way to playback. You could also experiment with the click sound. Rather than a beep (which I always find hard to hear), try recording a couple of bars of say stick taps and combine with maracas, then loop it create your click track.

[mrufino1]

On the mbox, you want to leave the mix control for playback and mute the drum tracks so they don't play back through the system (although all the way to play back would do this too). Something tells me you can hear your drums acoustically...We used our in ears last session and the drummer was able to hear the click much better. One way to make a click, and the way I prefer, is to paste a sample of a sound (cowbell, stick click, etc.) on each quarter note, use audiosuite plugins to pitch shift beat 1 up a bit and also increase the volume of beat one. Track must be a tick based track, the highlight the whole bar and use alt+r to repeat it throughout the track. Anyway, this works well for me (and is a necessity when using the 002 and low latency monitoring as aux inputs don't work with that mode). But isolation headphones would really help you a lot in this case.