As drummers we obsess about the wood, metal, thickness, tone, dampening, etc.. until after years of contemplation we choose our preferred sound.
Then we go into the studio and our preferred sound is transformed into the generic usefulness of the engineer's convenient needs.
It seems Protools and the liberal use of notch filters to subdue the essential character of a drum are being used for convenience more than an examined approach. Go with what worked in the past because time is money and you can make a drum sound perfectly good as a generic fit to the music.
The problem is that the first assumption will always be that the drums need to be fixed. As drummers we know how we need to tune to get the drum to project in a musical setting and we will even change that tuning to suit the clean approach in the studio, but invariably, the engineer is looking to make the initial drum sound to be good while soloed or alone. Often this gives the control of the beautiful overtones to the engineer who (my assumption) hasn't yet put in the contemplation of how the overtones mix into the music.
I watch a lot of videos on mixing drums and drum sounds. Most of the time those sounds are boring and the fix is better but still boring. They expound on the virtues of their drum scheme and how much life it brought back to the recording, but it still sounds like a plastic bucket.
I always do whatever the engineer wants and never question them because I don't have their experience, so maybe my problem lies in the lack of communication.
I usually keep quiet because I hear disparaging comments about how drummers always want the drums to be the loudest, biggest sound.
I don't. I want the sound to only be a representation of what is presented.
If I tune the snare to fit well within the song, pulling all that tone away in the mix makes me feel like it doesn't matter if the drum is metal or wood or whatever.
I'm probably just in a funky rant, but I'm wondering if drum sounds are changing for the better in recording, or becoming more generic.
Maybe engineers should get the drum sounds after the other instruments and not as a standard practice of always getting the drums first.
they are after all, the sound we don't normally change after the first tracks are done.
Then we go into the studio and our preferred sound is transformed into the generic usefulness of the engineer's convenient needs.
It seems Protools and the liberal use of notch filters to subdue the essential character of a drum are being used for convenience more than an examined approach. Go with what worked in the past because time is money and you can make a drum sound perfectly good as a generic fit to the music.
The problem is that the first assumption will always be that the drums need to be fixed. As drummers we know how we need to tune to get the drum to project in a musical setting and we will even change that tuning to suit the clean approach in the studio, but invariably, the engineer is looking to make the initial drum sound to be good while soloed or alone. Often this gives the control of the beautiful overtones to the engineer who (my assumption) hasn't yet put in the contemplation of how the overtones mix into the music.
I watch a lot of videos on mixing drums and drum sounds. Most of the time those sounds are boring and the fix is better but still boring. They expound on the virtues of their drum scheme and how much life it brought back to the recording, but it still sounds like a plastic bucket.
I always do whatever the engineer wants and never question them because I don't have their experience, so maybe my problem lies in the lack of communication.
I usually keep quiet because I hear disparaging comments about how drummers always want the drums to be the loudest, biggest sound.
I don't. I want the sound to only be a representation of what is presented.
If I tune the snare to fit well within the song, pulling all that tone away in the mix makes me feel like it doesn't matter if the drum is metal or wood or whatever.
I'm probably just in a funky rant, but I'm wondering if drum sounds are changing for the better in recording, or becoming more generic.
Maybe engineers should get the drum sounds after the other instruments and not as a standard practice of always getting the drums first.
they are after all, the sound we don't normally change after the first tracks are done.
Notching out the character
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