teach me how to do hand claps

[seriousbusinessmusic]

i'm curious to hear how some of you out there are recording handclaps. given a good room, how do you folks mic, record, and mix claps? how do you do motown claps? DFA claps? claps in a loud punkrock mix? claps in a quieter R&B jam? anyone?!

since i generally record claps while drunk and/or stoned and with friends, i often don't take time to experiment. i've just been throwing up a large diaphragm condenser, standing a few feet away and hoping for the best. i never get the best. and mixing those fuckers is always a bitch. i can never get em to sit right. they always seem to be clashing with guitar/snare/vox upper middle register stuff. reverb helps a bit but often sounds cheesed out. any suggestions?

help me record the delicious handclap sound of my dreams. thanks.

[soundguy]

if you plan on compressing claps ALOT, keep in mind your distance from the mic if you do not want to bring up a lot of room with them. I usually get my best results by getting a few friends and making sure one of them isnt a musician at all. IF you have three or four drumers clapping perfectly in time, it sucks, you get that thin loud clap that doesnt imply four people. But when you get your neighbor to come over who will always slightly lag behind because he's so nervous, that lag spreads out the clap and gives you that 80's drum machine type of clap that is SUPER fat, sorta like three claps nudged apart a bit. Thats what I like. The single big clap sounds too much like a snare drum and a lot of the time will disappear completely behind a snare, but the fat nervous neighbor group clap is really easy to mix with.

Real men dont fly in claps.... Clap 'em all...

dave

[Bear]

Fat nervous neighbor claps help a lot, as Dave said. As does a little bit of pitch shifting. I've had a good amount of success with an omni mic, three people, and the song sped up quite a bit during the recording. It was even more difficult to stay on time because of the speed, and since I did about 8 takes total, it sounded like a lot of fucking people. It was no trouble to mix.

But yeah, on time clapping is for the birds. Stupid drummers.

[rafter]

someone told me once how to get a cool handclap sound recorded - and it works!
cup your hands together when you clap - hold them semi-closed position when they're open, just open enough so you can fit them together. then clap and instead of letting yr hands bounce off eachother, make contact and keep contact for a tiny microsecond.

i like this style of clapping - sounds less harsh/hard, way less "BANG" and more "CLAP", and it fits in more mixes easier.

plus i've found that pitch shifting (lowering) hand claps sounds great, and that the room you record them in is KEY. i think i like my ribbons best for recording claps tho a 57 shure does the trick too.

[phalex]

just tune your hands to the key of the song before you record. i find that is the best way to get the claps to sit just right in the mix.

[wing]

interesting fact: did you know in japan they actually have hand-clapping lessons? i don't mean for audio production, i mean for average people to learn how to clap to songs on time, since apparently many have a hard time with that. so they actually have classes and exercises on learning to clap to songs correctly and on time. heheh...

[JohnDavisNYC]

i've had good results recording hand claps (and tambourine) reflections, like off the window between the studio and control room, or even just a brick wall or something. it can help take care of overy fast transients and makes it sound a little mushier, which i tend to prefer, especially if i'm tracking digital.

cheers,
j

[penrithmatt]

get a few people
get close to the mic
compress fairly heavily
record.
on mix pan real claps slightly to one side
get a short delay,with no feedback,and pan that to the other side.
get balance between real and slight delayed claps
marvel at how fucking clever you are fo getting such a cool sound
cheers
matthew
www.allairestudios.com

[Rick Hunter]

Claps are awesome. What Dave said usually works for me. Its all about the claps in "Penelopy" on Pinback's Blue Screens Life.

[cgarges]

interesting fact: did you know in japan they actually have hand-clapping lessons? i don't mean for audio production, i mean for average people to learn how to clap to songs on time, since apparently many have a hard time with that. so they actually have classes and exercises on learning to clap to songs correctly and on time. heheh...

See Dave, now Japan's got it going on!

I'm with Toaster on recording claps.

Here's another neat trick that percussionist Jim Brock taught me: If you don't have a group of people around to track handclaps, pull up your pant leg and use both hands to smack the sides of your leg. It gives a similar sound and needs fewer passes of overdubs to make it sound like a group of people.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[seriousbusinessmusic]

thanks for all the tips.

is there a general EQ scheme that you guys will employ in the mixing stage? will you shelve off low end of chop up the frequencies in the claps to make em sit better?
are there compressors specifically that you've found to work well? ratio? threshold? attack/release?

[trashy]

Wing and Simms once made fun of the way I record handclaps. They called it "complicated". I complicated their lives by putting them in a coma with my ninja moves.

I often record hand claps alone. Here's how I do it to get a not-just-one-guy-alone sound:
I use an onmi mic and back off of it a few feet (so it gets some nice reflections.) I record one bar of handclaps like 14 times, moving around the room a bit. I lay them out on top of each other in four or five tracks, panned variously, over some odd number of measures - 5,7,9 - odd numbers, ever hear of them? And then I lay that on the song. It sounds good. I eq out the low end, and make sure it has a place to sit in the mix. Sometimes I might add a few samples of delay to either channel to make it jump out abit.

That's how I do it!

[wing]

Wing and Simms once made fun of the way I record handclaps. They called it "complicated". I complicated their lives by putting them in a coma with my ninja moves.

you mean comacated? hahahaha!!

ok, nevermind.

[trashy]

Wing and Simms once made fun of the way I record handclaps. They called it "complicated". I complicated their lives by putting them in a coma with my ninja moves.

you mean comacated? hahahaha!!

ok, nevermind.

Okay, now you've really pissed me off! HEEEYAAAAH!!!!!! (performs "Double Flying Fists of Terror Monkeys," Wing falls under the blows, gets itchy rash that won't go away.)

[wing]

Wing and Simms once made fun of the way I record handclaps. They called it "complicated". I complicated their lives by putting them in a coma with my ninja moves.

you mean comacated? hahahaha!!

ok, nevermind.

Okay, now you've really pissed me off! HEEEYAAAAH!!!!!! (performs "Double Flying Fists of Terror Monkeys," Wing falls under the blows, gets itchy rash that won't go away.)

i pity you oh weak ninja. i am the king of ninjas. haven't you seen my house? it's totally 16-bit.



sooooo.... how about those hand claps?

umm.. to be helpful, i guess, i've gotten a good hand clap sound recording into two overhead mics by the drums, panned hard left/right... and then adding a slight stereo delay or slapback. very slight. unless you want a very echo-ey effect...