How to record a song part 2/6: drums!

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Once our project is ready to record, we need to start from the foundations of our song, which for a rock/metal song is the rhythmic section, and the first instrument to record of the rhythmic section is the drums.

Now we need to setup the tempo track, which will contain the metronome of our song, with all the necessary variations. The click, in case we are recording acoustic drums, will be sent via headphones to the drummer in order to make him follow a reference that will be the same for all the other instruments.

How will we record our drums?
Will we use a Midi virtual drumkit? In this case we will need to write every single midi note in the piano roll and to adjust the velocity and the other parameters in order to make the drum sampler sound as realistic as possible (click here for a dedicated article about velocity and the other midi parameters).
Alternatively to writing manually the Midi notes, they can also be acquired by using an electronic drumkit or by applying triggers to a real drumset (click here for a dedicated article).

Will we use a real drumset?
Then, according to how many microphones we have, we can use different techniques.
If we have only 2 microphones the best method is the one described in this article.

If we have more inputs in our audio interface instead, we can close mike every drum part.
Here is an article about how to microphone all the single parts of a drumset, and here is another one specific on how to microphone the cymbals.

Finally, here is an article with various microphone setups arranged by genre.

It's important to say that a drumkit can be also recorded both with microphones and triggers in order to add sampled drum sounds on top of the acoustic ones later, or to replace entirely some drum part that did not come out well; this gives us also a lot of flexibility in terms of editing.


CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/6: PREPARATION!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3/6: BASS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4/6: GUITARS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 5/6: VOCALS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 6/6: KEYBOARDS AND EXTRA ARRANGEMENTS!


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