Recording: Drums (Day 3 – Finished)

The full drum setup

Drums are all finished.

We hammered out 9 songs over the course of 3 days and we’re pretty happy with the sounds. The songs have a bunch of tempo and timing changes in them, so it was impossible to nail the songs in a single take — we ended up doing tons of punch-ins to get things just right, so that means a TON of editing to make each take flow seamlessly together without any obvious cuts.

Since we only had 3 days to record (technically, only 2 since the first day was all setup and testing), we went for the 95% rule on each take: if a take wasn’t at least 95% perfect, we re-recorded it. Ideally, you don’t want to settle for anything less than 100%, but that’s also not really practical when you’re doing an independent record and are pressed for time. It’s a minor compromise we can live with.

All finished. JT is classy.

The 95% rule meant we would let very tiny things slide. For example, if we had a 6-bar section that was all fast double kick,  and everything sounded great but the kick had a few slight hitches or uneven hits here and there within those bars, we would live with that take — 95% of it was good, it just needs a tiny bit of polish. It’s easier for me to go in afterwards, during editing, and quantize that kick so it’s perfectly even with the timing grid than it would be to keep pounding out take after take. Besides, it’s smarter to have all of the songs at 95% and polish it later than it is to spend tons of time getting some songs to 100%, but then running out of time and having to rush the remaining songs, perhaps risking achieving only 80% or so on those.

That’s all speculative, of course, but we stuck with this approach and it worked perfectly for the amount of time we had for drum tracking, as we wrapped up with no time to spare. Overall, we’re happy with the outcome and with a little spit and polish (and editing), they’ll be 98%-100% where we would ideally want them. We can live with that and be proud of the results.

• Drums (basic mix)
  

Now it’s time to enter Editing Hell. This is probably my least favorite part of the process, but it’s a necessary evil. I’ll be spending a bunch of time editing each recorded track to make sure the various takes are seamless, the hits line up perfectly in time, any bad hits/rimshots/etc. are replaced with good hits, and removing unnecessary junk audio from the tracks (like cutting out all of the bleed between hits on the tom tracks). I’ll detail this step in the process, too, but be forewarned: it’s about to become even more tedious, haha.