1979 – Drum Sound – Capture (LO1)

In terms of how the drums were captured on this track, it is difficult to know fully, but articles on how the album it belongs to (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) do share some techniques used.

Flood, one of the producers of the album along with Alan Moulder, said in an article for emusician.co.uk that Jimmy Chamberlain (drummer of The Smashing Pumpkins) “used to love having the kick drum and a bit of snare going through his wedges, which were directly behind him. So if you’ve got a kit that’s lacking a bit of bottom end, you pump the kick and the snare through the wedges and you start to tweak them to get extra weight.” This is an interesting technique to add lower frequencies to the drum sound, but is not entirely practical given that I will be recording in the university Multi-track studio.

Chamberlain then notes that “from there I go to microphones as far as how I want the drums to sit dimensionally in the track. If I want the drums up front and aggressive, I’ll use a lot of AKG C 414s so they sit in front of things dimensionally. If I want the drums to sit in a rhythm section configuration, I’ll lean back towards the 414s and maybe some Shure SM98s. Then maybe go for Shure 12As on the bigger drums.” These microphone choices will be hugely useful in influencing my own choices in mics. His fondness for AKG C414s is something that I will try to take into account when choosing mics. I have always traditionally used these mics to record overheads and as room mics but have never tried them on individual drums or cymbals.

 

http://www.emusician.com/gear/1332/signal-to-noise-the-sonic-diary-of-the-smashing-pumpkins/40242

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *