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across the whole recording process. I always thought of myself as a consistent player. I’d been brought in to replace drummers on their album sessions because I could give very consistent results, like playing the drums the same volume from beginning to end of a song, even playing the same fills from one take to another, when the band’s drummers couldn’t. But this, as I soon realised, required a much deeper level of consistency. You might be sampling the softest hits on a 12” tom, for instance. There are no VU meters on the drum or anywhere near your kit, so you have to use your ear and touch to determine the right velocity stroke to achieve a group of consistent soft hits. Then you switch to a 14” tom. You may spend some time sampling louder hits, but when you eventually get to the soft hits, those hits on the 14” tom need to match, both in loudness and tone, the softest hits recorded earlier on the 12” tom. You might spend the rest of the day recording snare drums and cymbals, on which the softest hits should still match those recorded on the toms. Over the next few days, you will record other toms, with different heads and tunings, but all the soft hits should match the ones first recorded on the 12” tom on day one. The same is true of the loudest hits and all the hits in between. If the utmost consistency isn’t there, your drum sample product will jump around unacceptably in tone and volume once the user is selecting drum choices from the menu in the software. Likewise, if you are recording rimshots on a snare drum, each one has to have an identical brightness of attack, the identical mix of head and hoop in the stroke. You need the stick to target the same one-inch zone on the drum head. Stray from that and the rimshot will
have more overtones, more ring to it. Again, this continues across several days of snare drum recordings. You spend a couple of hours sampling one snare drum with sticks. Then you do it all again, this time with brushes, and then again with hot rods. In the end, as the drummer, you find yourself sitting with tight shoulders arching upward and maybe even an irregular breathing pattern as you attempt each perfect stroke and wait for the resonance to die away, hoping not to hear a squeak from the drum stool, or a gasp as you breathe out, after having held your breath for the 30 seconds it took to hit a floor tom and let it speak its full sustain. I soon realised this wasn’t the fun, creative process I was used to after years of recording songs. But I understood this was a means to an end, a necessary evil. The enjoyment and satisfaction would come with the finished product, using the drum software myself and seeing others happily using it. At the end of four days, we’d recorded most of what we’d set out to do, but still had some great cymbals and snare drums from my collection that remained untouched in their cases. We decided to book a second session, but would use the hiatus as an opportunity to listen to what we’d recorded so far and make note of any specifics we needed to cover more effectively on a second visit to the studio. This we did a few weeks later. Chris continues his explanation next edition, when we discover how the samples are produced and turned into VSTs. In the meanwhile, check out his latest expansion pack for Toontrack here.
www. ear eckon. com digitalDRUMMER, MAY 2011
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