Today we began to track drums for our song "The Drifter." Our last CD entitled "Bumble" (2009) was primarily tracked rhythm guitar and vocals first done to a click track. Drums, bass, then layers of lead and "textural" guitar work were overdubbed later. Though this is fairly standard operating procedure for the DIY home studio, it makes for a less-than-organic feel to the music. This time around we decided to not use a click track, and record the drums first with a "scratch" vocal and guitar part to be replaced later. This provides for a much more organic feel, and allows the song to breathe.
Mike jamming out on his kit.
Mike is the worlds happiest drummer since he got his new kit.
Allen (me) setting up the tracks to record in Pro Tools.
Laying down very very very scratch vocals. (This photo was posed, if you can't tell)
One of the most important things when recording drums with other instruments going is to either isolate the drums the best you can, or isolate the other instruments from the drums. In our case, since we recorded in Mike's garage, I ducked my amplifier behind some furniture and threw some blankets over the amp (be wary your amp overheating when doing this) and had the amp turned to a relatively low level to keep as little of the guitar sound bleeding into the drum mics. For the scratch vocals, I tried to keep as far away from the drums as possible and sing at a much lower level. All monitoring of guitar and vocals would be done via headphones through the monitoring in Pro Tools.
Now with the basic drum tracks done... onto recording the guitars. More to come later!
We did the drums-last thing on a few of our songs the last time we recorded and they came out really shitty. The drums-first songs were pretty bad, too, but not AS bad.
ReplyDeleteRecording the drum track at the same time as a scratch guitar track seems like the way to go, you really get that more organic feel of people playing together instead of people playing along to a drum set.
We have like almost all the stuff we need to record our own stuff rather than doing it with semi-friends, so I can't wait to start recording again.
Hey Derek.
ReplyDeleteVery cool. Good luck with the recording! What kind of gear or DAW do you work with?