Recording Toms When You’re In A Hurry

If time is tight for a full‑band session, you won’t be able to perfect all aspects of a drum recording. But if you prioritise, you can still ensure you get decent results every time.

In an ideal world you’d have the time and budget available to approach a band recording session just as you’d like. We should always aspire to make great recordings, and I really don’t want to ‘dumb down’ the art of recording drums... But this article isn’t about sessions where you have time to audition different drum heads or tune the toms to the key of the song. It’s about the practical reality of recording bands with acoustic drum kits in less‑than‑ideal circumstances. I was inspired to write it after a recent discussion with a year‑three music tech student about how best to approach recording a typical indie/rock style band playing live in the studio. The catch was that their college only offered 2‑3 hour studio slots to their students. That’s a pretty big ask for any full band recording involving a drum kit! But with experience, you’ll learn how to prioritise and pace the setting up of a session, what fall‑back options you can deploy to save time, and when and where you should be spending time fighting battles.

Below, I’ll focus on how you can get a tom sound to a good or, at worst, usable place in the space of just a few minutes, freeing up precious time to do everything else you need to do on the session. Often, when trying to get a band set up quickly to record, I’ll follow the steps that I’ve described below. I’ll then be presented with a natural break of 15 minutes or so in which I can fine‑tune the toms further, with the bonus of actually having heard them in the proper context!

Spend enough time right at the start of a session making sure that the drum kit is fully optimised. That’s before you focus on mic choice or techniques, never mind sweating about which preamp to use for the hi‑hat.

The Kit Comes First

As I explained to this student, it’s hugely important to understand that, after the quality of the drummer and their performance, the sound of the kit will almost certainly have the biggest influence over the sound that comes from your speakers. More so than the mics, and more so than the rest of the recording chain or your mix processing. It should be obvious, then, that when recording live drums engineers should spend enough time right at the start of a session making sure that the drum kit is fully optimised. That’s before you focus on mic choice or techniques, never mind sweating about which preamp to use for the hi‑hat spot mic!

Even in a hurried session, there should be ample time for a drummer to get their toms sounding good before you record — but you might need to encourage some drummers to spend sufficient time and attention to that. It can help to have plenty of spare tuning keys to hand and, if you know what you’re doing, tools like a DrumDial, which can often help you locate a problem quickly.

While it might not be quite so tight on a typical commercial studio session, time is nonetheless often a rare luxury, and more often than not I find myself tasked with getting a drum kit prepped and miked up as quickly as possible. I try to run my studio in a way that facilitates that. For example, I always have a good‑sounding drum kit set up in my studio, with decent heads and in decent shape tuning‑wise. Sometimes that pays dividends, and if you have the chance to keep a kit in good session‑ready condition, or at least to get in early and set up in advance of a session, I’d encourage that. But, understandably, drummers will often prefer to use their own drums, and even if they’re happy using the house kit they may have very different ideas about tuning and the tone, particularly with their toms.

In that scenario, there’s only so much you can do in advance, so you’ll still need to spend a good chunk of the available time assessing and treating the sound of the drums. To keep on top of things, you’re going to need a plan, and a good starting point is to ask yourself what signals you absolutely must capture to ensure you can get a good result. On a short session like this, for example, before I could start to get the rest of the band up and running with headphone mixes, I’d definitely want to know that I had something good coming through my kick, snare, and overhead mics. Get those choices and techniques right, and you should have a decent image of the kit, as well as a cue mix that allows all the artists to feel and respond to the groove.

Only then will you really know how much time you have to get a result from the rest of the kit mics, including the toms, as well as from the other instruments. When it comes to the toms — which you’ll recall I said drummers can be very particular about — you’ll probably not have much time to experiment, but this doesn’t mean you have to put up with them sounding like cardboard boxes. The trick is to have a few good, reliable techniques that you can reach for quickly, that you can rely on to assess and, to some extent, manipulate these often mysterious parts of a standard acoustic drum kit when time is tight and you really need to get some recordings down.

Drummers Have Feelings...