With the home studio being the most likely place where you are going to be recording your own projects and demos, here are some things I have learned to keep in mind when recording percussion.
I developed a vital technique from studio work regarding recording shaker and tambourine tracks. Our first instinct is to stand in front of a microphone facing it (like a vocalist) and playing away as normal. Not such a good idea with what I call the swinging instruments like shakers and tambourines. When you face the mic head-on, any back swing of a shaker carries it further away from the microphone making it notably quieter then the forward swings, resulting in an un-natural feel.
Now if you take a step to the side of the mic swinging the instrument “across” the path of the microphone you get a much more balanced, musical sound. Additionally, you can visually determine if you are 4 or 12 inches away from the mic and consistently retain that distance. In the case of a tambourine you need to determine how you are swinging it (side to side, up and down or front to back) to choose your position with the mic. Also if you are striking your hand with it on the backbeat for instance is that strike coming through balanced or do you need to move the strike zone further or closer to the mic?
Until I shared this with studio engineers we often had jagged, pointed feeling shaker tracks rather than a nice smooth flowing effect, resulting in a lot of tracks not being used after all. Now, at least my efforts are kept in the mix and I have a great reputation of “sweetening” up some song or other that needed that little extra something. A lot of my work was to make programmed drum machine tracks feel more ”human” by way of adding a little tasteful percussion.
When recording two congas do not make the error of panning the left and right conga too far apart. It will sound like multiple drummers and seem strange. Keep them at 10 and 2 o’clock (or a similar spread) to make it sound more realistic.
For the instruments that are very loud and sharp (cowbell, tambourine, vibraslap, clave sticks) often a room mic is preferable as opposed to close micing like a hand drum would require. The sound of a nicely resonant room tends to enhance the richness of percussion instruments so I use overheads to record all my conga tracks in this manner as opposed to live when the mics are close.
Comments
Post a Comment