Rack Tom
As you can hear in the sample below, the rack tom and floor tom mics picked up a lot of leakage, and the toms lacked punch.
Again, some gating and EQ helped those problems:
Shown at left are the gate and EQ settings for the rack tom.
A cut around 600 Hz is fairly typical for toms. A low-end boost brought out the tone of the drum. I set the gate release time long enough to hear the tom-tom ringing.
With the overhead mics, I wanted to pick up mostly just the cymbals, so I rolled off everything below 500 Hz.
The Mix With Reverb & Effects
Now that the sound of the drums was improved, we needed some reverb to simulate the original venue.
I set up a reverb plug-in with 0.4 second reverb time, and inserted a reverb send in the snare and toms tracks.
Here is the result:
Reprise: The Finished Mix
Those drums are really starting to sound live, but one vital ingredient is missing: the audience reaction.
I had recorded some applause and yelling at the end of each song.
As shown at right, I copied and pasted some of that under the drum solo in the bottom four tracks.
And this was the final result:
Adding some crowd reaction works amazingly well to simulate a live event.
I hope you enjoyed hearing and seeing how this “simulated live” recording came together.
AES and Syn Aud Con member Bruce Bartlett is a recording engineer, microphone engineer and audio journalist. His latest books are Practical Recording Techniques (5th Ed.) and Recording Music On Location.
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