Heavy Metal Bass Drum

[Mike Rock]

I'm recording my friends heavy metal (thrash) band and I'm just looking for tips on Mic placement, eqing and compression/limiting to get that great attack that alot of metal albums have on the bass drum. I have a AKG d112 just inside the opening on the outer BD skin and wondering what (if any) mic I should put inside the drum itself, and where I should place it. I have at my disposal 1 sm58 and two mics from the audio technica "kit pack" for drums.

[markwayne]

It's going to sound like heresy to a lot of people, but I worked with a producer back in the 90's in a rather heavy, south Florida band who always replaced the kick with the same composite sample. Every band he recorded had the exact, same kick!

Just an observation. Not a suggestion.
Wayne

[chrispick]

It's going to sound like heresy to a lot of people, but I worked with a producer back in the 90's in a rather heavy, south Florida band who always replaced the kick with the same composite sample. Every band he recorded had the exact, same kick!

Just an observation. Not a suggestion.
Wayne

I don't think this is an uncommon trick.

[oldguitars]

My observation is that kick should sound like a kick, not a tick. That being said, add some 3 to 4 k, roll out a bunch 200 to 400hz and add or subtract the lower lows as needed. compress 4to1 with the attack set to allow mucho snap to come through. one mic inside the drum should be fine since this kind of sound is more of a manufactured kind of sound as opposed to a capture kind of thing. Yep, and chrispick is right, most of the bands add samples (or flat out replace with samples)

[zara_drummer]

Take the front head off the kick...Taking the head off allows for more air to move...More volume. If the drums are decent they will have minimal muffeling in them. My DW's came with a small pillow type thing velcro'd in. I haven't touched it.

My suggestion also is to (if drummer doesnt already have one) get a DW 2 sided beater...One side is felt the other is plastic...Use the plastic side...Sounds fantastic!!! The plastic side creates the attack that your looking for. The felt side has an obviously softer attack.

Place the mic closer to the batter head..slightly off-center, this way you get the "thwappy" attack you want and can still get some of the bottom end of the kick.

These are things that I have done and been shown, and have worked for me time in and time out. Best of luck to you!

[TomWa]

Wow, good advice here. Here's my $.02. Use the "hard" side of the beater as someone mentioned and then--and this is sick--tape 50 cent pieces or thin wood to the skin where the beater hits. I recorded an album with a group called "killers" (ex-Iron Maiden singer) and you can hear the result there. Wicked attack, too much for my taste really, but the producer liked it.

[macsrock]

its true.. my mate had to remix the latest slipknot "live album". in A london studio, the basically sent him a load of hard disks full of there live tour and insisted on retriggering the all of the drums and remixing the entire"live project".
so most metal drums you hear thease days , even tho played live, they are still trigeered with great samples, ie . fear factory, meshuggah, arch enemy

[zara_drummer]

ugh, I tried sampling once...used drumagog to replace a track and it sounded like poop...

i play alot of ghost notes and stuff like that...some triggers just aren't THAT sensitive...the replacement software certainly wasnt. It ended up making the track sound really square and lifeless...

Ended up re-recording the whole session...made more sense just to re-do it properly.

[Mike Rock]

Thanks for all the great advice. I'm just curious about the best way to trigger though. My friend has some triggers and an alesis drum sample unit I may be able to borrow. Should I slap the trigger on and record it with the rest of the kit or pass the miced bass drum signal into the unit before mixing if thats even possible. I know sound replacer would do the trick but unfortunately I dont have access to Pro Tools. I just imagine the horror of having to place a sampled bass drum sound over every kick hit there must be a better way right?

[hostrow]

There's some good stuff here but I have to ask for the manufacturer and model of the microphone that your using. Changing the kick beater and removing the front head are all "best practices" but in end the it's the microphone, unless your using trigged samples, that has to capture the sound. Personally I prefer the Sennhauser MD 421 for an aggressive kick sound. I put it in the kick and I move it around where the beater meets the head to find the sweat spot. An EV RE-20 is also a good choice but it doesn't have the same mid boast as the MD 421. A lot of engineers and producers use SM 57's for the kick but I find that I have to EQ the living crap out of it to get a solid kick drum. Where I come from no EQ is the best EQ. As for samples well they tend to rather sterile but heck there definitely popular. Of course these are opinions and well you know the rest.

As for how to trigger samplees I used to use a noise gate using the key feature for this kind of thing years ago. The "key" feature enables the gate to produce a key voltage when "opened" and the opposite when the gate closed. I used the key voltage to trigger a sync to produce a low growl that I used to mix with the mic'd drum. I would think that modern gate plug ins would have the same thing but without having to deal with the key voltage issue something like key-to-MIDI and use the MIDI to trigger the sample. Anyway good luck

[zara_drummer]

I've had good experiences with both the AKG d-112, and the Shure Beta 52. I think Im more partial to the beta52. its got more head room...picks up more of the punch of the kick.

Changing the beater is pretty much essential to get the that clicky sound...there just isn't enough attack. Taking the front head off is preference on my part as I like the kick to be able to breath more...give you a lil more room when trying to place the mic as well.


Drumagog is a drum replacement software...its basically a plug in...you select your track...choose a sample...it will even use different samples if you played at different volumes thruout the track...Its ok IMO...when i used it, it was just easier to re-track...

[John A. Collins]

to get that sound, I first tune the drum to sound that way; I loosent the batter head untill it just starts to make a tone rather than a flabby plastic thing blowing in the wind. Then I tune the resonant head really carefully whatever pitch the drum will "sing" at loudest. I use a six inch offset hole in the resonant head. Then I double mic the drum with a 57 or a Senheiser (uh, 602? whatever that little guy is...) and a low freq mic. (I use a Senheiser bass mic). Anyway, put the 57 inside aimed toward the impact of the beater a few inches away and off center a few inches. then experiment with the low freq mic about 4-6 inches outside of the hole on the reso' head untill you get a nice warm tone with a little impact. then mix them later and you get that wicked slap from the beater and the encompassing low boom from the reso. basically, the low freq mic should be a good normal bass drum sound by itself, then add the beater mic to give it that 'smak'. I use this setup for all styles of music on my drumset actually. I just like that sound. Back when I was reinventing the wheel, I actually manually marked and inserted a sample of said recording into a poor previous recording. It took a long time and it wasn't worth it. (But I showed that recording/computer who was boss!! )

[markwayne]

While all of the advice here is good. The original poster was, I believe, talking about a form of music that is typically, by choice, very dynamically limited. This is the real reason, I believe, that samples are so common in modern music. Our drummer at the time of the recording I mentioned earlier (who went on to work with Marilyn Manson) was very inconsistent with his right foot. There was only a small space available for each instrument and the tone and level of his kick was fluctuating too much for the overall mix.

I always prefer the sound of real drums recorded in a real space. But the general public, saddly, has been conditioned to dismiss anything that does not sound like what they hear on the (insanely hyper-compressed) radio and/or MTV outlets. This is, IMO, a big part of the reason why recordings by the Sex Pistols, The Who, Flipper or the Ramones can still sound dangerous after all these years while most of the current crop of "heavy" bands sound toothless.

Here's a vote for bringing back live musicians recorded in live spaces.
Wayne

[macsrock]

yes ghost notes in most replacements are almost inposible to recreate but there are some out there that can, just gotta shop around and know how to trigger carefully

[David Polich]

It's true that the kick sound you hear on most metal records is a triggered sample. I've recorded for 20 years - no kick drum in the world sounds like the kick on a Slipknot record. Or a Metallica record, for that matter.

In DP, you can insert the "trigger" insert on the kick drum track and re-trigger a MIDI sample. It takes some adjusting and fine tuning of the input and output parameters, but I've done it lots of times and it does work.

Forget Drumagog - those samples aren't that great. For great heavy metal kicks, there are plenty in NI's Battery 2, also Toon Track DFH Superior has some, and Stylus RMX has loads. I create sound libraries for the Yamaha Motif series keyboards and I put some heavy metal kicks in the "Studio Drums" library for the Motif ES. You can purchase that library at the motif mart at this site:
http://www.motifator.com.

Hope this helps.