One of the things that I discovered in the course of the last few weeks since writing part I of this series was how easy, and I mean extraordinarily easy, it was to get ahead of myself in what I’ve been doing vs. the needs of the article itself. I found myself digging in and recording drums and guitarand mixing them, playing with them. Then I found myself sitting in my garage with a friend of a friend and her 10 year old daughter recording vocals against karaoke tracks for the young ladies grandparents for Christmas. I became totally absorbed, in other words, into the world of recording.
So, I had to check myself, step back, and look at the goal of the article series. That being to learn how to record on the cheap, share the experience with other’s and apply feedback from the Drumrock forum’s as necessary (which there is some, and it will get acknowledge in this and other segments), and to publish it in a way that makes it easy for folks to follow and take it step by step.
Stepping back, the focus of this part of the article is going to be setting up all the gear that was referenced in part I. Getting it all wired together, and finding best ways to set things up, a bit on tuning the drums, and at the end of this piece have some basic tracking done – no heavy mixing or application of effects – just the beginnings. Some of the gear has changed since the first part of the article, and I’ll point that out as we get into the “meat” of the
topic.
First off, I have to go through the list of things that have changed in the hardware configuration that I outlined in part I.
or starters, the “monitoring” system I had planned on using, a Sony receiver with a pair of Bose 301’s attached, went pretty much out the door the first time I mixed something down with it and then played that mix through standard CD player/stereo. Since money is an object here, I was left wondering what to do when a friend of mine mentioned he had a pair of Alesis M1 active monitors sitting inactive in his basement:
I can’t tell you how much an improvement these have made when mixing things down. That being said, I know that something like this may not be in everyone’s budget, they weren’t even in mine as the price for me was $0.00. That being said, I cannot express enough how important a good set of monitor’s are. (Thanks to long time forum member, one time staffer, Fussnfeathers for constantly pointing this out even though I ignored him regarding this for a long time) There are several listed on Musician’s Friend around the $100 mark, some with pretty decent review, so I’d highly recommend either a decent inexpensive set of monitor’s or a good set of headphones (though I’ve heard stories about mixing through headphones, so me, I’m sticking with monitors.)
Second – my kit. I have added a 16x16 floor tom to the setup and I have to say the added low end is something I was missing and only really peripherally knew I was missing:
It does, however, complicate things a tad, in two ways. First, tuning as I now must tune my kit going from fusion size toms to a standard size floor. That
part’s not insurmountable, and for the deal I received on the floor tom, it wasn’t something I could pass on (much to my lovely wife’s dismay). Second,
I don’t have the microphones for the added tom. I’ll show you what I’ve done later on in the article for now to get by this and let you know what I’m
planning on doing later as well.
The only other change was the addition of a 19” LCD to replace the cumbersome 17” CRT monitor I had on the PC running Reaper:
Thanks to the gents that made this happen, who for various reasons must remain anonymous at this time.
Getting things set up took me a good while as I did add an additional tom to the mix on my kit. Going from two up and two down to three up and two down on my tom configuration made for some interesting changes to my kit. I won’t get into it too much, there’s a thread on the forum regarding my setup, but it does affect my microphone placement some.
Before I delve into microphone placement and how it affected the adjusting and placement of certain components of my kit, I have to put in a word on tuning the kit, which, and this will become apparent when you play the clips later on, is something I’m only so-so at doing. I’m actually getting better at it and I have to give props to Slipknot1 over at the Pearl Drummer’s Forum for posting an EXCELLENT “how-to”, or a better way to say it, “how-I” on tuning drums, which you can find here:
Slipknot1 Drum Tuning Thread
This may or may not work for you but it helped me out a lot in terms of tuning my kit. Thanks to Will for letting me link it up.
Regarding the placement of my mic’s – in the original configuration, I had plenty of mic’s to go around – one for each tom, kick, snare, and two overheads. Adding the additional floor put me one mic short. This left me in something of a bind as there are a couple of related issues here. First, buying another mic right now is not an option – its Christmas time after all (see previous reference to wife’s dismay regarding the floor tom). Second, if I did acquire another mic for the tom, my inputs on the Alesis are rapidly dwindling.
So for now, to get around the lack of the additional microphone, I am mic’ing the 14” and 16” toms using the same mic, placed in between the two toms:
This doesn’t quite give me the granularity I want in mixing things (more on this later) but it works. So for the purposes of this segment of the article,
this is the kit mic’d up.
I had to make some adjustments to splash placement in order to accommodate the mic’s and cables up front, it works for now, but I’ll probably be playing with this for some time to come as I learn more about what sounds each mic is picking up from sources other than what is supposed to be coming through a given mic. (This is called bleed and can greatly affect your mix in the end depending on how you handle it.)
A word on when I do add that last mic, as it is the second issue stated above. The Alesis mixer I have has a total of 16 inputs, 8 mono channels, and 4 stereo pairs. In the original configuration, I had enough mono channels for my kit plus one stereo pair for my Alesis D4. Once I add the new mic, I will be out of mono inputs. My current plan is to move my overheads, which require phantom power so I can’t simply move them to a stereo pair, off to my Behringer mixer’s two powered inputs, panning each one hard left and hard right depending on overhead placement. I’ll then take the left and right outputs from the Behringer into a second stereo pair on the Alesis, adjusting gain across the Behringer as necessary for a clean sound. From there I’ll be able to track each overhead separately into the PC as the Alesis sends the pairs across the firewire as independent channels. All of that being stated, for the purposes of this part of the series, and since I don’t have the mic yet, the kit will be mic’d using a shared microphone, again, for the 14 and 16” toms.
Overhead placement was a bit of a challenge as there are several methods of doing this. I used this outstanding article, (ARTICLE LINK), as a good jumping off point and decided to go with the spaced pair method vs. an x/y configuration, mainly due to the fact that I’m using more than just the overheads to mic the kit. I’ve seen some mention of x/y by some folks using multiple mics so depending on my level of mood in experimentation, this may or may not change later on depending on the sound given the space I’m using. Bottom line is finding a placement method you like that gets the sound you want and run with it.
Wiring all of this up into the mixer was quite easy to do. I picked up a hand full of inexpensive XLR –XLR cables from Guitar Center (20’ at about $7.99 each) and proceeded to wire it up.
One of the things that I did as I cabled up each mic was to label each cable on the mixer end with what the cable was connected to:
This helps in the setup of the software side of things which I’ll show a little later.
In cabling up I tried to do things in a logical order. Overheads on the first two inputs, followed by kick on input 3, snare on 4, toms on 5,6,7, and 8. A lot of people will label the mixer itself but I think for this operation putting the tags on the cable will be sufficient. Yes my labels are big – I like the tag/zip strip setup because they’re easier to remove than tape labels.
The stereo pair coming out of my D4 were patched into two of the stereo pairs on the Alesis mixer. (Inputs 9 and 10)
And that’s really all there was to do in so far as mic’ing up the kit itself. A safety note here, when you finish up, there are tons of cables going every
which way:
Be careful you don’t create a major trip hazard or pull your board off your table, *as I almost did) because of a poorly routed cable that decided it liked your ankle as a good place to wrap itself up. If you’re extremely anal about things, which I am not, then you should take the time and try and route things so there are no trip hazards.
I’m not going to touch on room acoustics in this article series much unless I feel I need to make accommodations with regards to the room I’m recording in (in this case 99% of it will be my garage). Acoustics is a science in and of itself, and there are TONS of outstanding, free, resources on the Internet that address this. In subsequent parts of this series I may be referencing some of these, but for the main purposes of this article series, I wanted to give it mention and let you all know that we will possibly get into at least the basics regarding sound control later on.
From this point forward I spent some time adjusting mics and cables in order to maintain comfort while playing without smacking my mics with sticks.
The Audix Fusion mics are large comparatively and on an 8” tom it eats up a nice chunk of space:
Once I had everything set I was ready to go.
I won’t get into the install of Reaper. It’s about as straightforward as you can get. The package is about 3 megabytes in size once downloaded and
if you accept the defaults during the install it goes on so quick that you’ll blink and it will be done.
As far as configuring the software goes the hardest part was setting it up to utilize the Alesis. Since the mixer comes with ASIO drivers, I’m using
those for the audio device config in Reaper:
Note the Enable Inputs checkbox. This corresponds with the 16 individual channels that the Alesis provides. There are also two additional inputs, Main_InL and Main_InR as the Alesis mixer also sends the main output out via left and right channels across the firewire to the PC. As I’m not sure exactly why I’d want this I’ve left them out as options for now.
To start a new project I simply clicked File, New Project and away I went. Inserting new tracks into the project was as simple as hitting Ctrl-T on my
keyboard. Since I am using 8 mic’s plus two channels of one stereo pair, I’ve added 10 tracks here for the drums:
In order to associate mics with tracks I simply hit the [R] button on each track. I then right clicked the associated meter for each track that pops up
after you hit the [R] button and went to mono inputs and selected each. You can double click the grey area and name each track with what each input
is for. So what I ended up with was this:
Some notes here, you can group tracks under a “folder” in order to adjust gain of all tracks in that group at once or maintain granular control and for project organization. I won’t get into the details of how to do this just yet, but you’ll notice in later parts of this series that the drums will be grouped, along with guitar, bass, and vocals. It’s really useful.
You can also assign aliases to inputs themselves so instead of “Tims Mixer MIC_LINE_1” it would actually say “Right Overhead – Line 1” However I haven’t done that yet as it hasn’t been necessary.
When recording I’ve left all levels and panning in software at defaults for each track.
On the mixer side, I’ve set all faders to 0db:
I’ve also applied no EQ to any of the tracks coming out of the mixer with the exception of my kick and low toms. I’ve cranked the highs up and left the lows at mid range per a suggestion by Fussnfeathers from the user forums:
The Alesis also allows for the ability on each XLR input to cut high frequencies from “deep” sounding inputs (i.e. kick, low toms, or bass guitar) which I have done on kick, 14” tom and 16” tom:
For the purposes of this part of the series the only other thing I tried was recording a guitar track. I tried this two ways – first I brought the instrument cable directly out of the Dean (see part I) into a single input on one of the stereo pairs (Line_9) in this case:
Note: From this point forward I’m going to roll back in time a bit to before I added the new floor tom to my original kit configuration as I did this initial attempt at recording using that configuration. Later recordings will include the new tom.
I was pleasantly surprised that directly into this line from the guitar produced a clean signal with good levels. Forum member Slotbun made
the suggestion that I pick up a direct box or two for running instruments into the mixer, and I will probably do that at some point. Since
budgetary constraints are always a concern, right now I got around it by using a Digi pedal:
Since the sound wasn’t what I wanted coming direct out of the axe I ran the guitar into the Digi which has a preamp built in (though unneeded it appears here) to use a guitar sound I liked into Reaper.
I first recorded a flat guitar track into Reaper that, though my guitar skills are marginal at best, turned out not half bad. I then slapped on the head phones and proceeded to record drum tracks to the guitar part I had played.
How, you’re asking, did I do this? It was really simple. Anytime you are recording in Reaper, and you have your inputs setup properly, you simply
click the red record button on the transport bar and Reaper begins recording:
On the Alesis, since I don’t need to hear the drums through the mix, I simply ensured the drum inputs were not set to solo mode, and, since the mixer is also acting as the sound card for the PC now, the guitar track played back (after clicking the [R] button a second time on the guitar track so the guitar input was not being utilized anymore) through the headphones and I simply played along to the song until finished.
Once that was done I ended up with this essentially. The primary difference from this image was tracks five through ten. They were uncut wave files. (Note how tracks one through four look). I’ll touch on why the last six tracks look cut up shortly:
The first thing that I went through and did for all tracks was normalize them in order to set a base level for mixing this down:
Essentially this sets all the tracks to 0db volume (which, I’ve discovered is counter-intuitive in that initially to me 0db meant I shouldn’t be able to hear it, but that’s not the case.) and allows you to adjust each track into the mix at appropriate levels later on.
Once that was accomplished I then ran a feature on tracks five through ten called Auto Trim/Split. Essentially this removes a lot of the bleed over from drum components into a given input that shouldn’t be there:
This is why these tracks look chopped up. But it removes a ton of excess sound from the mix that otherwise “muddies” things up and makes it seem to flat for my tastes.
Notice the overhead tracks are not trimmed/split. As I read around the ‘net on ways to do some of these things and just through experimentation, I found that having the overhead tracks full adds depth and body to the mix. Trimming and splitting also causes the cymbal sounds, hats and ride especially, sound like utter garbage. So it really wasn’t an option here.
Obviously I didn’t trim/split the guitar tracks. Note the plurality on the word track:
I added a second guitar track simply by inserting a new track into the space in Reaper and then copying the original track into the new one.
This allowed for me to adjust the guitars position in the mix to make it sound fuller.
After all of that was done I then spent a lot of time adjusting levels in order to make things sound somewhat decent. Note as you look at the
screenshot here, the varying levels of each track, then as you listen to the track (linked below) where each piece of the instrument is in the mix:
Mixing is probably the single most patience trying piece of this whole process. I was expecting results immediately, but, alas, that was not the case, and spent more time adjusting, tweaking, readjusting, listening, tweaking more, then readjusting then I thought I would need to. Mixing a session is an art form that I’m hoping I get more proficient at as time goes on. Again - good monitors are key here. We'll get further into the mixing down process in later segments, I just wanted to get the setup basics covered and a first try out so you could see where we're headed.
What I ended up with is linked here simply entitled Guitar1:
(CLICK TO HEAR/DOWNLOAD MP3)
Obviously, since this is my first attempt, and this section of the article was meant to be basic recording only (3500 words into it); I have not added any effects or equalization at the software level. These are more advanced features I hope to get into as the series progresses.
I have to say the experience so far has been great. I’ve actually done more than what I’ve said here in so far as recording other instruments and vocals goes. We’ve recorded some extremely clean guitar tracks using an Ovation guitar and a Rode NTK and some basic bass tracks, again going direct into the Alesis. I’ve also recorded a local young girl who at the age of 10 has a phenomenal voice. She wanted to record a Christmas CD for her grandparents so I helped her and her mom out with that – I have permission to post snippets from her parents and we’ll be doing that later on in this series as well.
I really hope that this second part was helpful and not too convoluted. Once you really start to get into the recording process there is so much you can do I can’t even begin to scrape the surface. And it’s VERY easy to get absorbed to the point of getting lost in it all. The point of all of this is to have fun and hopefully learn things along the way. Please, as always, you guys help shape this so please, log into the forum, comment, suggest, recommend, and we’ll modify or give credit where credit is due.
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Footnote: I'm going to give props to the guys at Cuckos for an outstanding software package in terms of Reaper. Reaper can be found here: http://www.reaper.fm
Enjoy!