Recording drum machines!

[twitchmonitor]

I checked the "best of" sticky and didn't see anything...I figured this might be something people asked about. Anyway, I just recorded a few songs with Don Cab-esqe band and in one song, there's an Electribe drum machine playing through most of it. They wanted it to sound extra cool, so we tried playing it through a Rhodes 18" speaker and I recorded that (421, RE20 on the grille, 87 a few feet back) and it was....ok. How do you guys record drum machines and make them sound great? I'm not talking about making a drum machine sound "real" or human, just taking a run of the mill drum machine pattern and taking it to a higher level.

[bmsander]

try a shitty little guitar cab at the bottom of a stairwell with a mic at the top of the stairs. Don't forget to tweak the shitty little cab. Mix in w/ original signal.

[Zeppelin4Life]

one word: limiters

[eeldip]

sansamp is another one.

[nacho459]

I have been working with a lot of electro rock bands, and some drum and bass stuff. The last session I did I ran the drum machine to my AG440 which was set up for +9 but I used 456 and ran the needles around +3 so I was overloading the tape and getting a really squishy loud sound. I then transfered the tape to PT, added all the other instruments and edited. Then I mixed it back to 456 on the AG440 still calibrated to +9. Crazy LoFi sound!

[eeldip]

i also like it when the snare has a little juicy EQ on it... zero in on the snare freq with a parametric, and boost that with a narrow peak. i like that sound.

if you can get an independant out on the snare, try running it thru a BP filter. that's cool too.

[twitchmonitor]

one word: limiters

Oh, yeah. forgot to mention: I bussed the 3 mics to one channel, ran it through my VLA with pretty heavy compression, and then to one track in PT. I was thinking sansamp might add that extra something.

[eeldip]

oh and if you are mixing a direct and an amped track... fiddle with a sample accurate delay on one of the two tracks. see if delay one or the other by 10-100 samples or so makes things sound better.

[Red Rockets Glare]

arise therefore by palace has some sublime sounding drum machine on it, little suprise that Albini recorded it.

[giganova]

If you start with crappy samples (such as from the Electribe, yikes -- I have one of those and the sound is really bad) you will never get a decent sound.

Maybe a better drum machine would do (such as the Electron Machinedrum or the EMU Command Station), processed through a tube mic with a fast compressor. I recently switched to a soft drum machine (Battery II) and the sound is amazing (you can chose from samples which were miced with 7 mics and you can select the different mic samples separately).

[Milkmansound]

I can say that the machinedrum sounds fantasitc and will sit well in any mix and you can tweak it to death from inside the box - mine cost a lot of money and the electribes are way way cheaper and easier to get ahold of.

I ususally smash my drum boxes with the crappiest compresser I can find if i want to damage the sound - the alesis nanocompressor is good for that. Also, my symetrix 522. Crush it to death!

[toothpastefordinner]

The electribe is a fine drum machine that sounds good!

I like to run mine thru my fender champ and mic it from a foot or so, with some creative or conventional compression... and then EQ as necessary and mix in with the original signal to get some "punch" and dynamics back. Doesn't sound like a real drummer, but it DOES sound like a sweet-ass drum machine. Sometimes that's what you want, just some dirty ol drum machine sounds. I know I do.

[joelpatterson]

I used to be obsessive about having some sample of the latest music I'd done on the answering machine... and I found that placing the boom-box just so in relation to the microscopical little mic "port" on the answering machine made all the difference, and sometimes I needed to place a washcloth over the boom-box, sometimes just a sheer paper towel to get it to sound just right...

...and the moral of the story is that with the freedom to experiment, you'll come up with some protocol that sounds absurd to describe but does just the exact right thing for you.

[apropos of nothing]

Programming programming programming.

You can have the awesomest-sounding drum machine in the world and if you don't have a killer beat programmed on it, its gonna sound like crap. And vise versa (I'm telling T.O. this -- Duh).

By which I mean I've gotten some really nice sounding stuff with a DR-550, and some really crappy stuff with 24-bit samples.

[madtho]

If you start with crappy samples? you will never get a decent sound.

Our race was founded on crappy samples, friend. We do with what we got.

I like my electribe through the dbx 117 with my Tascam 424 inputs mostly cranked.

-mad