Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

crystalmsc wrote:

Automatic Gainsay wrote:Ever since a friend of mine made it clear to me that drums could effectively be recorded with one mic, I've never looked back.

well, good music is what it's all about and it's captured nicely. what mic you are using?

An Alesis AM51 through an ART Tube Pac.

Mics are my weakness. I know relatively little about them, but this one seems to work well for me in a number of ways.

mome rath wrote:

Automatic Gainsay wrote: Ever since a friend of mine made it clear to me that drums could effectively be recorded with one mic, I've never looked back.

explain. with pictures?

It's a really basic and primitive process.
I take my Alesis AM51 mic on a boom stand, and I basically move it around whatever room the drums are in, changing location and height and recording a bit, until I find a place in the room where the balance between drums suits my tastes... a place where the highhat and cymbals don't overpower the bass drum, primarily. (although usually, some EQing is necessarily to really bring out the bass frequencies in the kick). It's really an aural process where you use the acoustics of the room and the way the mic picks up those acoustics to mix the drums.
I like it because for me, it is the room that makes drums sound like drums, not just the heads. When I have individually miked heads, I have always been disappointed with the sound. I like the way the drums move air in a room, not the way that sticks move the drum head, if that makes sense.
I record through an ART Tube Pac which gives a bit of tube warmth and distortion to a VS-1680.
Once recorded, I usually beef up the bass drum and the low end of the snare with equalization.

I don't have any pictures... just imagine a sweaty worried-looking guy setting up a mic in a room, playing drums, listening to the recording, jumping up, moving the mic, playing drums, listening to the recording, jumping up, moving the mic, playing drums, listening to the recording, jumping up, adjusting boom height, playing drums, listening to the recording, jumping up, adjusting mic direction, playing drums, X50 and you'll have it. : )

Purity_Control wrote:

I don't know what that is!

lol just wondering.

they;re cute blue tank things with autonomous ai from the anime series of ghost in the shell... tachikoma translates literally as 'think tank'.

Yeah, I just looked it up! Cool!

Since Godfrey's Cordial songs are instrumental, and technically not specifically ABOUT anything, I decided they should all have names that seemed technological or futuristic in the late 60s and early 70s.

Here are a couple more tracks:


http://www.recondite-media.com/synthesi ... riceye.mp3
With the exception of a CS-50 line which is most audible at the beginning, but eventually disappears, this is 100% ARP 2600 plus live drums.

http://www.recondite-media.com/synthesi ... aytrip.mp3

In both of them, any polyphonic synthesizer you hear is actually individually played monophonic lines. As some are so enthusiastic to point out, nothing beats individual articulation... and multitracked mono does it WAY better than any polyphonic.

Automatic Gainsay wrote:An Alesis AM51 through an ART Tube Pac.

those works nicely in the track.