How to get a Kick out of the Bass Drum using EQ

The bass drum, which many know as the kick drum, plays an important role in music. It stirs emotion in the audience, making them want to dance as it thumps through their bodies. This is of course, what it's supposed to do but if the kick drum is mixed incorrectly, it will leave the audience feeling pretty bored - no matter how good a song might actually be. Don't worry though, because that's why I wrote this post. To help you learn from my bad experiences...

Okay, so it's called the bass drum... So, if you're anything like the younger version of myself, you'll be thinking that the more bass the better, right? Well, I'm afraid not, but I won't just tell you, I'll show you. Below is a picture of the EQ settings for a kick drum. It is evident from the picture that only the bass frequencies (100 - 200 Hz) have been boosted.

EQ for a kick drum, where only the bass has been boosted. Click on Image for full size.

One would think this would make your kick drum more lively. Don't get me wrong, it does give it some thump, however, when added to the rest of the instruments, the bass gets lost and the beat with it. Below is a link to an .MP3 extract from a song where the above EQ has been used.

kick-with-only-bass.mp3 (588 KB)

Okay, you might be thinking that it didn't sound too bad, but if you play around with some of the higher frequencies (3000 - 5000 Hz) you will find what many call "the Click"...

For the rest of this post visit the new home of Brian's Bedroom at the link below:
http://briansbedroom.org/sound-mixing-tips/how-to-get-a-kick-out-of-the-bass-drum-using-eq/

Jazz and Blues Hydrogen Drum Beat Templates

Why do guitarists put drumsticks on the dash of their cars?

… So they can park in the Handicapped spot!

Lame, I know - but I kind of started a theme here with these drum beat templates and I didn’t want to let you down. So seriously now… I’ve working on another beat template which uses Jazz and Blues rhythms. But I tried something new this time - I noticed that in my beat templates a lot of the beats had similar characteristics and it made things really bulky. So with this template, I’ve made patterns for both the right and left hands as well as for the right foot (i.e. the kick drum). This means that you are able to make many different beats by just playing the any R-hand, L-hand and R-foot combination simultaneously...

For more, read the full post at the new home of Brian's Bedroom at: http://briansbedroom.org/

Using the Wii Remote to Control Hydrogen and Ardour on Ubuntu Linux

I've found two great videos on using the Nintendo Wii's Wiimote to control audio programs in Ubuntu Studio (or any linux distro). The first is posted at msound.org
Drumming With WiiMote, Hydrogen and Itouch. The second is the prototype done by the Ardour development team using the WiiMote to control Ardour.

Drumming With a WiiMote in Hydrogen

See the original post at msound.org:
Drumming With WiiMote, Hydrogen and Itouch

If you can't access YouTube or don't have flash, becks from msound.org has connected his WiiMote as a midi controller to the hydrogen using a PERL script that can be downloaded from here. He's also using the Apple Ipod Touch in a similar fashion. Lastly, he shows that fancy tools don't increase your drumming ability :)

Using a WiiMote in Ardour

See the original Ardour post: Prototype Wiimote Control For Ardour Added.

In this video, James Bond from the Ardour Dev team connects the WiiMote up to Ardour through the options menu (You'll need to follow the instructions here). Features available are:

• Button A starts and stops the transport (play and stop).
  
• D-Pad left/right moves the play head left and right.
  
• D-Pad up/down scrolls through tracks (vertically).
• Plus and minus buttons zoom in and out.
• Button 1 enables recording on a track (arms the track).
• Button 2 enables recording on the session (you can then press A to start recording).
  
• Button B deletes the last recording if you fluffed it (Don't ever press the B Button, 007).
• Home resets the play head to the beginning of the track (or the selected marker).

Unfortunately, you'll need some Linux experience to get your WiiMote working with these programs. You'll also need Bluetooth on your PC. Hopefully we'll see the Ardour support in the next release.

Funk Hydrogen Beat Templates

What are the last words a drummer says in a band?

..."Hey guys, why don't we try one of my songs?"

As you should know if you read my previous beat templates post, Hydrogen Drumbeat Templates - A Non-drummer's Best Friend, I have been creating beat templates in order to help non-drummers write better songs in Hydrogen. The basic idea is that you download the Hydrogen song which has many different patterns in it and rearrange these patterns until it suits your song.

In this post I present you with my second ever beat template which focuses around the funk genre. These beats, however, can be used in most genres such as rock, hip-hop, pop and even metal at times. You can download this template from the link below.

The actual template: BriansBeatsFUNK.h2song (235 kB)
Note: These songs require the YamahaVintageKit available for download from here.

A MP3 sample of the template: FUNKBeatsExample.mp3 (837 kB)
The Hydrogen song of the MP3: FUNKBeatsExample.h2song (235 kB)

Once again, I have only used a closed hi-hat for the right-hand rhythm, however it is easy enough to interchange this with whatever suits you, like the ride, open hats, or crash. Just copy the same pattern on the ride, or crash and then delete the notes from the hi-hat. I hope you enjoy creating new beats!

Other posts you might find interesting:
Hydrogen Drumbeat Templates - A Non-drummer's Best Friend
Hydrogen Drumkits
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Pimp my Hydrogen Beats
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Beat

Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 3: Adding Effects to the Ardour Drumtrack

Okay, by now you should have a drum track recorded in Ardour as the first step for your recording project. If not, check out Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 2: Recording a Hydrogen Drumbeat. The drum track really is the backbone to your recording because it is often filled with the most emotion (i.e. build-ups, double tempos, break-downs etc.) However, in order to allow the recording artists to feel the full emotion of the song, we must add a few basic effects. These effects can then be tweaked towards the end of the project for the final mixdown.

Let's take a look at what we have. The figure below shows my multiple drum track recording of Sunday Bloody Sunday in Ardour.


It is important to record the drums as dry (i.e. no effects) as possible because this will make your recording more versatile. You can easily add effects to a dry recording but you cannot easily remove recorded effects. The above tracks are therefore dry and can be heard from the MP3 below.

DryDrums.mp3 (555 kB)

We now need to add effects to each drum by using Ardour's Mixer. The mixer can be opened from Ardour's Window menu by selecting Show Mixer (or pressing Alt+M). This should look similar to the one below, minus all the effects on each drum.


You can add effects to each drum by right-clicking in the black rectangle above each drum's level fader and selecting New Plugin. A list of all your installed effects will be shown, choose the relevant effect and select Connect. You should now see your effect appear in the black rectangle. The effect should still be bypassed so double click on it and a window displaying all the effect's options will appear. You can vary the effect options and click the Bypass button to switch the effect on or off.

Now that you know how to add effects, which effects best suit drums? Firstly, if you want a natural sounding drum kit, stay away from EQ. The effect which is easiest and most effective for use on drums is reverb. I used the TAP Reverberator which requires a a stereo input. I therefore used the Hilbert Tranformer to convert my mono track to a stereo one. I also used the TAP Equalizer to make my kit sound a bit more like U2's, but as I said earlier, be subtle when using the EQ. The drum track with added effects can be heard from the MP3 below.

WetDrums.mp3 (555 kB)

Compressors are very useful for drums because they make the drums sound powerful. However, you can add these during the mixing stage of the project. The early use of effects is merely to inspire the artists with a emotion-provoking drum track. For more information on some cool Linux effects, check out this post: My Favourite Linux Audio Effects.

In the next part of the Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio series, our song should start taking shape as we add a guitar track.

Other posts you might find interesting:
Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 1: Plan your Project
Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 2: Record a Hydrogen Drumbeat
Overview of Compression
Hydrogen Drumbeat Templates - A Non-drummers Best Friend
Panning for Gold

Hydrogen Drumbeat Templates - A Non-drummer's Best Friend

How do you know the stage is level?

...the drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth.

Yeah, yeah... I've heard them all. I know as a non-drummer it is very difficult to think like a drummer. Especially when most non-drummers reckon that drummers don't have the capability of thinking much :). However, to make a decent sounding drumbeat from a drum machine, you need to "think" like a drummer.

This can be quite a task, but don't fear! I, as a drummer, have done the thinking for you and made a bunch of Hydrogen beat templates which you can simply piece together to make a drumbeat. The concept is simple - all I have done is made a Hydrogen Song using various rock patterns. You can download this song and simply rearrange the patterns to suit you. Below is a link to the first beat template I have made:

BriansBeatsROCK.h2song (217 kB)
Note: These songs require the YamahaVintageKit available for download from here.

It consists of several basic 4/4 rock beats with a few fills. There is also a crash and drag pattern which can be overlaid on any of the pieces in order to pimp them. This sounds a bit weird but I have made an example song which shows just how easily these beat templates can be used. This can be downloaded from the link below:

ROCKBeatsExample.h2song (217 kB)
ROCKBeatsExample.mp3 (747 kB)

I have only used a closed hi-hat for the right-hand rhythm, however it is easy enough to interchange this with whatever suits you, like the ride, open hats, or crash. This is just my first attempt at beat templates. If I feel they are successful I will make more templates to suite the various genres such as Punk, Metal, Jazz, Funk, Latin and Pop. So please let me know by means of commenting on this post if you find these templates useful.

Other posts you might find interesting:
Hydrogen Drumbeat Templates: FUNK Beats
Hydrogen Drumkits
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Pimp my Hydrogen Beats
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Beat

Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 2: Record a Hydrogen Drumbeat

Okay, so you've planned your recording project like I told you to do in Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 1: Plan your Project. You now want to create a Hydrogen drumbeat as the backbone to your track.

To begin, start up JACK and then Hydrogen. You can begin messing around with beats and patterns to get a feel for the program. If you want a more in depth description of the Hydrogen interface check out this post: Hydrogen Drum Machine Basics.

If you are unsure of the drumbeat that you will use for the song, just write a simple one and loop it for the entire song. As long as it is set at the same timing and at the same tempo, you can replace the beat with a better one at a later stage. A useful tip to remember: always start the beat off with a count-in, it will make the recording process a lot easier and you can always remove it later. For our recording project, we are using a Hydrogen beat for U2's song: Sunday Bloody Sunday - it is available for download here: Sunday Bloodly Sunday Hydrogen Drumbeat.

Once you have finished your beat, and you can play along to it in Hydrogen, you want to record it into Ardour. So start up Ardour and create a project with whatever name makes you sleep better at night. The Ardour interface should have only one track called Master. All the future tracks will be linked to the Master bus and then output to your soundcard. You now want to create enough tracks to record your drumbeat into. Hydrogen can either output one stereo track or a stereo track for each instrument/drum. I prefer to use multiple outputs, because it's more versatile - but if you are just laying down a simple beat, rather use the single stereo output (it is easier). I explain how to enable multiple outputs in Hydrogen in this post: Multiple Outputs for Hydrogen.

To add a track in Ardour, click on File and select Add Track. A window appears which allows you to chose how many tracks you want to add and whether those tracks are going to be stereo or mono.

If you are using Multiple outputs, select mono and add about six tracks. You can then change the names of the tracks by clicking in the track name and typing what you like. Use relevant names like snare, kick, crash, etc. it will only make it easier for you later.

If you are using just one stereo output, select stereo and add one track only. Name it Drums.

You now need to connect the Hydrogen outputs to the Ardour inputs, you do this from JACK. Open the JACK connections kit by clicking on the Connect button. This looks like the below figure.


Expand the Hydrogen tab under Outputs and the Ardour tab under Inputs. You now need to connect the relevant drum outputs to the inputs of Ardour. The Hydrogen outputs are unfortunately labeled as numbers, so you have to look in Hydrogen and determine which number links to which drum. Pan each Hydrogen instrument/drum fully to the left from the Hydrogen mixer. Then link only the left output of the instrument to the mono Ardour input.

Once all your connections are linked up correctly, you can start recording. Go back to Ardour and change the tempo so that it is the same as that found in Hydrogen. You can change it by double-clicking on the number (just above the Master track) and typing in the relevant tempo. You must now arm all of the tracks by clicking on the red circle found by each track's name (Only armed tracks will be recorded to). Once all the tracks are armed, select the Record Button (red circle) on the Ardour transport bar and then select the Play button - Ardour is now recording any activity in the armed tracks. Quickly go back to Hydrogen and click the Play button. If you observe the tracks in Ardour, you will see the drum waves being recorded. When the song is finished, press the Stop button in Ardour. Your Ardour project should look something like the below figure.


Your drumbeat has now been captured into Ardour and you can leave Hydrogen behind. It is important to drag your recorded drumtrack into time with Ardour's time, if you don't, Ardour's click track will not be in time. This is done by clicking on the drumtrack and dragging it till it aligns with the bar lines of Ardour. In Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 3: Adding Effects to the Ardour Drumtrack, I will be discussing how to add effects to your drumbeat in Ardour.

Other posts you might find interesting:
Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 1: Plan your Project
Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Beat
Hydrogen Drumkits
Pimp my Hydrogen Beats
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Hydrogen Drumbeat Templates - A Non-drummer's Best Friend

Hydrogen Drum Machine Basics

This post aims to cover the basics around the Hydrogen Drum Machine interface and hopefully get a newbie feeling comfortable with the setup. Firstly, start up JACK and then Hydrogen. Once in Hydrogen, you want to select a drumkit which will suit your song the best. You can do this by opening the View menu and selecting Show Drumkit Manager. This will look like the figure below:


You can select which drumkit best suits you and then click Load Drumkit. If you don't like the default selection of kits, there are quite a few you can download from:
Hydrogen Drumkits or Hydrogen-music.org Drumkits

Once you have chosen your kit, you can familiarise yourself with the Hydrogen interface. The components of the interface are explained below:

• The Pattern Editor

  This is where you write each drum pattern or fill by selecting which drum/instrument (y-axis) makes a sound at what time (x-axis). The figure below shows what this looks like.
  
  
  As you can see from the above figure, the time at which an instrument is meant to play, is represented by a dot. The vertical line below each note represents its volume. If you click and drag the line down, the volume of that particular note will decrease. Attached to the pattern editor window is some useful stuff shown in the figure below:
  
  
  Explaining the figure from left to right: The pattern number and name; the size defines how long a pattern is; the resolution defines how many notes can fit into that size pattern. The recording bar allows you to record what you play on your computer keyboard or via a MIDI input. Play around with the pattern size and resolution to get a better idea of what it does.

• The Song Editor

  This is where you schedule when each pattern will play during the song. As seen in the figure below, many patterns make up an entire song and these patterns can be repeated or overlapped. You can also change a pattern's name by right clicking on its name and selecting Properties.
  
  

• The Mixer

  This allows you to change the level/volume of each drum and also allows you to add effects or pan the instruments. The mixer is shown below:
  
  
  You can add effects by clicking on the FX button in the bottom right corner of this window. This will open the window seen below.
  
  
  A total of four effects can be added to each instrument. These are added by clicking on the Edit button and selecting an effect you like. The wetness (or level) of the effect can then be varied on each instrument by using the four dials found above each volume fader on the mixer.

• The Transport Bar

  The transport bar is shown in the figure below. It allows you to play back either one pattern or the whole song. The tempo is shown as large numbers which represent the beats per minute. This tempo can be altered by selecting the + and - buttons found next to it or by double clicking on the numbers. The transport bar basically allows you to navigate your way around the song and to play it back.
  
  

• The Instrument Editor

  This window is not too important for making a Hydrogen song but can be used to edit the drum sounds. To find out more about this window, read my post on How to Make a Hydrogen Drumkit.

Those are the basics of the Hydrogen interface, now you can get cracking with making some awesome drumbeats

Other posts you might find interesting:
Hydrogen Drumkits
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Pimp my Hydrogen Beats
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Beat

Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Drumbeat

U2's song, Sunday Bloody Sunday has quite a complicated drumbeat, so I decided to make a Hydrogen song out of it. I have done this for three reasons:

1. So that drummers can look at the Hydrogen drumbeat patterns and work out how to play it.
2. So that guitarists can play along to a decent drumbeat without getting their hands dirty.
3. Because its just too cool.

I used the YamahaVintageKit by ArtemioLabs (Downloadable from here). Note that you will need this drumkit to play the Hydrogen song (.h2song format). The song is available from the links below:

• Hydrogen Song (.h2song.zip) (3.9 KB)
• Short drumbeat sample (.mp3) (388 KB)
• Full length drumbeat (.mp3) (4.2 MB)

Other posts you might find interesting:
How to make a Hydrogen Drumkit
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Multiple Outputs for Hydrogen
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Hydrogen Drumkits

How to Make a Hydrogen Drumkit

This post explains how to create a Hydrogen drumkit without editing any code i.e. a point-and-click method. This may sound complicated but it is actually really easy. So when you decide to do this, simply refer back to this post and follow the steps. Here we go:

1. Open Hydrogen (No-brainer), and make sure the Instrument Editor window is open.
2. Go to View and select Show Drumkit Manager. Select any drumkit and click Load Drumkit. This will be used as a base for your new kit.
   
3. I will assume that you already have the relevant sound files, you want to create the kit with, saved into a file (.wav, .flac, .au or .aiff formats).
4. Select the relevant instrument you want to edit, i.e. Snare, and view it in the Layers tab of the Instrument Editor window. You should see something similar to the below figure:
5. Select the blue horizontal block and click on the Delete Layer button.
6. Now you want to add your own sound, so click on the Load Layer button. This opens a file browser which allows you to choose your sound.
   
7. Select your sound and click Open. Your sound is now loaded as an instrument.
   
8. If you want to use multiple layers for each instrument, i.e. soft and loud snare hits, you must load another layer. This is done by repeating step 6.
9. With multiple layers you need to edit the volume at which each layer is activated. This is done by shrinking the blue horizontal bars in the Instrument Editor. As seen in the below figure, the two layers look like steps. This means that at high volumes the 1st layer will be used and at low volumes the 2nd layer is used (i.e. left is quiet and right is loud).
10. You can rename your instrument by clicking on its name in the Instrument tab of the Instrument Editor.
11. The Instrument tab also has some cool knobs which can be used to edit your instrument's sound. The most important of these is the instrument gain which allows you to raise or lower your instrument's volume to match the other parts of the kit.
12. The Layers tab also has cool knobs. The gain knob edits the selected layer's gain and the pitch knob makes the selected layer sound either higher or lower.
13. To add more instruments, simply select another instrument and repeat steps 6 to 12.
14. Once you are happy with your kit, you have to SAVE it. This is done by visiting the Drumkit Manager mentioned in step 2. Select the Save tab and replace all the details with your own. Make it official by clicking on the Save button. You have now made your own drumkit. I recommend that you save periodically whilst making your kit - you don't want to lose all your work.
    
15. Once you feel your kit is complete and you haven't done anything illegal like stealing proprietary sounds. Export it by using the Export tab in the Drumkit Manager and then post a link to it both as a comment to this post and on the Hydrogen Forum. Check out 4shared.com for free file hosting/sharing.
    

Let me know if this information was useful by rating this post.

Other posts you might find interesting:
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Pimp my Beats
Multiple Outputs for Hydrogen
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Hydrogen Drumkits

High There?!

Do your recordings lack definition? Are the drums hard to hear with everything else playing? Is your mix a giant mess? Are you feeling depressed?

Well, I may have an answer to help all of the above (except the last one). First, let me ask you: do you use your high-end frequencies (10 k - 20 kHz)? If not - you definitely want to pay attention. If you do - you can add your comments and help the poor sods I mentioned in the previous sentence.

The average person's hearing ranges from 20 - 20000 Hz. So, when you see the faders on your EQ going up to 20 kHz - don't ignore the last ones! This is why: the frequencies above 10 kHz give definition and add a much needed 'sparkle' to certain instruments. Also, if you use the whole frequency spectrum, you can create a feeling of space or bunching. Another way of doing this is by using panning, but these two techniques should be used hand-in-hand. For further information on panning see my post: Panning for Gold.

Cymbals' frequencies are typically between 2 k and 20 kHz. Thus, if your drum track has the highs cutoff, they will lack definition and will not stand out. Other instruments which require a 'sparkle' factor are acoustic guitars, pianos and vocals. Vocals sound best when boosted in the low-frequencies (100 - 200 Hz) and high-frequencies (10 k - 20 kHz). Boosting the mid-frequencies (800 - 5000 Hz) can actually make the vocals more muddy and this is a common mistake.

To conclude: we have learned that the high-frequencies are important - don't forget them or reduce them on your EQ. It is for this very reason that condenser mics are better than dynamic ones. Condenser microphones have a better high-end response and thus have more DEFINITION.

Making a Roll Sound Realistic

This post explains how to make realistic sounding drum rolls with a drum machine. In order to sound like a drummer, you need to think like one. Firstly, I need to define, for those non-drummers, that there are two main types of rolls:

1. The single-stroke roll: The hand pattern is Right (R), Left (L), Right, Left...and the sticks do not bounce at all. Often heard in Nirvana's songs.
   
2. The multiple-bounce roll: The hand pattern is R,L,R, L...and the sticks bounce several times with each stroke. Often heard at the circus before anything "exciting"* happens. It is also often heard in songs played by any half-decent drummer.
   

* Exciting is in inverted commas because I don't believe much exciting happens at the circus :-)

With that in mind, we can edit the volume of each hit to mimic the movements of the drummers arms. Every drummer has a weaker arm, which will produce a quieter and different sounding hit. It produces a different sound because it has to hit the drum head at a different point to that of the other hand. The easiest way to mimic this with a drum machine is to make the each weaker hand's hit about 1/2 to 3/4 the volume of the stronger hand's. Being a right-handed drummer, I always choose the left hand to be weaker. This means that a single-strike roll will look like the figure below in Hydrogen:

For the multiple-bounce roll, one needs to make the sticks sound like they are bouncing. The first way to do this can be really painstaking and yields rather poor results. For this method, you add each bounce sound in as a snare hit but with a much quieter volume. This is seen below:

A better sounding and easier way of doing this is to use a drumkit which has a drag/ghost note prerecorded (A drag is a drum note which lets the drumstick bounce). The hydrogen kit that I made (available here) has a drag note and produces a simpler multiple-bounce roll seen below.

Here is and mp3 of each of the above rolls: Rolls.mp3 (285 kB). The first roll is a single-stroke roll followed by the two multiple-bounce rolls, the first is uses no drag/ghost hits and the second does.

These are the easiest ways of getting realistic drum rolls out of a machine. Bare in mind that a machine will never sound exactly like a drummer, there are just too many variables. Hydrogen also has a cool humanize dial which makes each beat slightly out of time randomly. This can be useful, but don't overdo it.

Other posts you might find interesting:
How to make a Hydrogen Drumkit
Pimp my Beats
Multiple Outputs for Hydrogen
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Hydrogen Drumkits

Pimp my Beats

I'm sure many of you that use hydrogen or play drums, have made several beats which just lack spunk. So, in this post, I'm going to show you a very simple way of turning your bland beats into slightly funkier ones.

Here is an .MP3 of a simple beat which is currently unpimped: Plain.mp3 (415kB)

You can pimp this beat by adding what is called a 'drag' at the end of the bar. This is done in Hydrogen by adding two 32nd snare notes just at the end of the bar and one on the first beat (see figure below).

The three 32nd snare notes must be significantly quieter than the other snare notes. Also, each 32nd note should be a slightly different volume to make it sound more human.

Take a listen to the new pimped up version of the previous beat: Drag.mp3 (416 kB)

Real drummers hardly ever play straight ordinary beats. They often add frills and cymbals to the straight forward beats just to spice them up a bit. So I encourage you to use the drag technique on any beat which sounds like it was played by Sony.

Another important tip is to remember that humans have only two arms and two feet (generally). This means that your programmed drum beats should have no more than two hand hits and two foot hits at any one time. Note: this does not apply when recording a cover of one of Def Leppard's songs.

Lastly, and most importantly, drummers typically have a weaker hand. This hand will produce a softer note, so if you are using two hands on a drum, make sure the each alternate note is softer. This will make it sound a hundred times more human.

Other posts you might find interesting:
How to make a Hydrogen Drumkit
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Multiple Outputs for Hydrogen
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Hydrogen Drumkits

Tips for Recording Drums

Recording acoustic drums can be extremely tricky. This is made even more difficult when recorded in a non-professional space. I found some articles which provide some decent insight into recording drums at home. Check them out:

• A Primer on Recording Drums at Home
• Record Drums - A Beginners Guide

For the lazy buggers like me, I've prepared an 'In a Nutshell' summary of these documents. I do, however, encourage you to check them out.

In a nutshell:

• Home recorded kits sound bad because studios use far bigger rooms with better acoustics. Bigger rooms = bigger sound.
  
• It is vitally important that your drum room has good acoustics (Many ways of doing this, I will write an entry on this in the future). But a rule of thumb, is that if your drums sound bad in your ear, they would sound bad in a recording.
  
• Always play your bass into a giant soft thing like a matress. It stops reflections which cause resonance, bass sound be a fairly clean sound.
  
• Different floor surfaces affect your sound dramatically (a hard surface provides more definition and sharpness where as a soft surface produces a dampened, warmer sound)
• The key is a good set of overhead mics (these should be condensers as they have a far better frequency response). Also be very careful of phase cancellation.
  
• Stay away from EQ!! This is a major pitfall. Focus your attention on getting a good room sound and using decent mics to record this good sound. EQ will probably hurt you more than help you. The only time I would condone the use of EQ is for compensation of lower quality mics' frequency responses.
• You can use mics placed far away (in another room) from the kit to make the room sound bigger.
  
• There are two useful effects for drums: gating and compression
• Gating allows one to eliminate the effects of bleed in the close mics by removing any sounds below a certain volume. i.e. your hi-hat will no longer be heard in your snare mic. More info
  
• Compression gives your drums power and resonance by reducing loud peaks and loudening quiet decays. Check out my post on compression.

Other posts you might find interesting:
Hydrogen Drumbeat Templates - A Non-drummer's Best Friend
Hydrogen Drumkits
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Pimp my Hydrogen Beats
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Beat

Free Drum Lessons

There is a fantastic website called http://freedrumlessons.com/. There are many instructional videos accompanied with pdf music sheets which guide one through several genres like rock, jazz, latin, and double bass drumming. Below is an example of one of the double bass lessons. If nothing else, these pdf sheets can give you some great ideas for use in Hydrogen.