After recording the drums for our album, I've decided to sample my drum set and to create a drum rack. I thought I might as well share it with you.
Feel free to download the Live Pack from my dropbox account:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/110461/Ableton% ... 0Drums.alp
The samples are completely unprocessed, straight as they came from the microphones. I had also set up M/S room microphones (Neumann U 87) and I've included them into the Rack.
Microphones used:
Kick Drum: Sennheiser se901 and Sennheiser se602 (individual volumes controlled separately inside the Kick slot)
Snare Drum Top: Shure SM57
Snare Drum Bottom: Audiix D1 (volume controlled separately with the "Snare Bottom" macro)
Tom Tom: Shure SM57
Floor Tom: Sennheiser MD421
HiHat: Rode NT2-A
Ride: Neumann TLM 103 (high pass filtered slightly in the simpler instance)
Overheads: Neumann KM 184 (X/Y)
Room: Neumann U 87 (M/S stereo technique)
The Rack is set up as follows:
Macro 5 and 6 control the overheads and the room. With macros 1 to 4, plus 7, you can control the direct microphones for kick, snare, toms and hihats. The direct volume of the ride is controlled inside its rack slot. Macro 8 fades in (or out) the snare bottom microphone for all the snare slots.
The "Kick", "Snare", both the "Tom" slots, and the "HH Closed" slots have two velocity layers. Soft from Vel. 0-63, hard from Vel. 64-127.
Start by turning up Macro 5 (Overheads) and turning down Macro 6 (Room). Create a some beat and then slowly bring in the the Room Macro. You'll notice that by turning down the overheads the crashes will disappear (naturally, they are recorded through the overhead microphones). They will, however, remain on the room microphones.
As the samples are all 100% unprocessed feel free to get some compressors and EQs in. To keep the whole drum set natural, however, be sure to process the direct mics ("Dry" chains) only and to leave the Overheads and Rooms alone. Of course you can also process them to get other effects, I'm not telling you how to use the Drum Rack..
Just to check it out quickly, you can also just play the clip I've programmed in the Live Pack and play around with the macros.
Have fun!
Cheers,
Matt
for sharing
