metal and punk snare and cymbals

[hollowidolrec]

having trouble getting that "up in your face" snare and cymbal sound. I have pretty decent gear and some knowledge of getting good sounds but can't get that crack out of my snare. anyone using small condensers as well as 57's? also I've been boosting some of my high end and cutting some lows out of the cymbals but lacking that "shimmer". is a lot of this "mastering" or is this possible without. thanks

[Snarl 12/8]

How's your room? How do your drums sound in the room? It has a huge effect on drum sounds. Even with close mics. Are these good small condensers or shitty ones. I think that can have an effect too, but I'd put the room treatment, drum quality, drum tuning and drummer's ability above mic quality on this one.

[hollowidolrec]

using either rode nt5 or at4040's in a large wooden room. sounds pretty good with a good kit and drummer. just trying to get THAT sound. just doesn't have that punch at mix. is this just having a really good compressor? I use art pro vla's and rnc's right now. any eq/compressor ideas on cymbals? should I go for overall "drum sound in the room" or just cut all the low end out and use them for just "cymbal sound" ?

[Snarl 12/8]

I would think you could get good sounds with nt5's and/or at4040's. "Large wooden room" could be awesome for recording, or problematic. You have no absorption whatsoever? You're gonna have to do trial and error for mic placement. Get some as isolatey as possible headphones and move around with one mic blasting in the headphones. Move the mic around the kit and over it listening for the best place. The room is full of sweet spots and dead spots, your job is to find the sweetest spots for the mics. And the drums for that matter. Did you experiment at all with moving the drums around in the room? For me, I try to get the OH's sounding so awesome I don't even need other mics, but you should try it both ways and see what you like. One thing people seem to say about bleed (one source getting into another source's mic) is to make the bleed sound as good as possible. Basically, mic'ing a drum kit is one huge bleed situation. So, keep moving the snare mic around until you love how the kick drum sounds in it, etc. Also, I'm concerned about phase in your situation. Do you have the ability to "flip phase" on your tracks, one at a time, oh's together, kick, etc., etc. until things sound as full as possible. Sorry about the stream of consciousness ramble, just trying to spitball a few ideas at you.

Last thing, you might try at least flying a "cloud" above the drums. Some mid/high frequency absorption between the overheads and the ceiling can really clean up your cymbal sound. I would try to get things as close as I could with mic choice, placement, room treatment, phase flipping, etc., etc. before resorting to EQ and compression and especially mastering.

You want the "faders up" mix to sound very satisfying, then when you add that stuff it goes to 11. Just my opinion.

[joninc]

"having trouble getting that "up in your face" snare and cymbal sound"

what kind of sound are you referencing? is there a record that has the sound you
are chasing?

as mentioned phase is absolutely key when trying to get a "solid" sound. things will feel hollow and thin when phase is not right.

is there a ton of bleed in your close mics? are the kick and snare reasonably isolated?

there are so many variables - more info would help us give some useful advice.

i find that doing a parallel comp for kick and snare helps really add some juice
in a rock context. helps keep them forward.

i know a lot of modern productions that have that "uber definition" thing going on are
using samples to enhance their live drums.

[losthighway]

A lot of the metal albums of the past decade + have triggered drum sounds. Not interesting if you're going for something organic, but if you're into a lot of the metal stuff these days that's the sound.

[I'm Painting Again]

post an example of what you're recording now and one of what you want it to sound like..

that ought to be perfect to get you more useful information in how to achieve your goals..

[drumsound]

I think Snarl's post hits all the hot spots.

For me, a parallel drum bus comp is really helpful. RNCs are great for that, and there are some good things ITB as well. I

[Snarl 12/8]

I think Snarl's post hits all the hot spots.

For me, a parallel drum bus comp is really helpful. RNCs are great for that, and there are some good things ITB as well. I

Thanks. I'm totally addicted to parallel drum bus comp now that I've got an analog board again. I couldn't do it for years after reading about it, due to latency on the auxes, on my Ramsa DA7 digital mixer. I wasn't sure if it's "that metal/punk snare cymbal sound" though, which is why I didn't mention it.

[kslight]

Just about any modern metal record with that impossible amount of attack and consistency sound is gonna be triggers layered with the live drum tracks, or just plain triggers. Listen to the double bass action for the dead giveaway.

On these types of records, drums may be heavy on attack but they are often also very "small" sounding, not boomy at all, to make room for everything else of course. Personally, not my thing, but I've had my hands in dozens of platinum selling metal session files for certain projects and they are absolutely as stated once they are mixed, regardless of how they were initially recorded.

[dfuruta]

mostly about kick, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aRu_3WvE6c

(turn on the closed captions)

[blungo2]

Don't know if this will help, but i try to first get a great snare sound in my overheads, then i bring up the close mic to the snare, usually with a bit of fairly slow attack/fast release compression. That usually gives me a nice punchy snare sound. My main snare mic is a modded (AMI) SM57, but sometimes for a little extra crack, i add an ATM450 right next to it.

[Recycled_Brains]

I hardly ever do it... but, Supplementing with triggers does just about all the work for you. I HATE the sound of just triggers, so I blend with the actual drum sounds. The last time I did it, I had 2 snare samples... one sounded like a snare drum, but real tight, and the other was purely attack. Just like the immediate transient of a drum being struck, so very staccato, and EQ'd very bright... I just solo'd the fuller sound and slowly brought the fader up on the [let's call it...] "attack track" until it cut enough, then blended that with the recorded snare (so 3 snare tracks total). Worked really well. Same exact thing for the kick too.

I've never triggered toms, because that sounds terrible to me, but same principle applies.

One thing you gotta watch out for with triggers though, is that they will expose every little flub and flaw in the playing, so the performance has to be tight and/or edited to be so before you sample replace everything.

That or a lot of compression on everything. The compression on the mix buss is your friend here. Use a slightly faster attack time so that the compression is triggered by the kick and snare... they'll duck the music a tad on impact.

[GussyLoveridge]

I like to try a bunch of different snares - keep changing them until I get the right sound. Often times I find that things I expect not to like are the right thing for the track.

If I go through a couple snares that don't work, I'll change mic set up.

+1 on parallel drum compression. Probably my favourite thing I've learned from the TOMB. (among other things, especially...IT DEPENDS)

Also find that brilliant finished cymbals tend to get me closer to where I'm headed for most punk/metal stuff. Though not always.

[permanent hearing damage]

to echo some previously voiced sentiments, can you name an example or two of what you're after?

i would bet most snares you like are high passed a bit higher than you might expect - and that will help it cut through, certainly. that said, player and drum make all the difference.

you may also want to pair a dynamic of some kind with one of those condensers.

also try maybe driving that VLA hard in parallel to break up. snares like distortion