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Lesson Info

Tracking with Sean Reinert

This is just something I actually wrote it's a little it's scaled down satou and I actually wrote for for drum channel when I did something a few months ago um and I just thought it would be perfect for this so we didn't need a five minute tune so I scaled it down to ninety seconds um but I thought it it kind of went all around the kid I thought it was a good example and then had a l just kind of decorate the christmas tree a little bit by adding cem cem textures and stuff and yeah that's cool let's see if it works okay I gotta get there buddy yeah, there are that part when I said don't be over eager to start recording that meant for mia's well so cool wait, theo power I was that in your head phone it was a little low so you could hear court kind of towards the end I wasn't hearing so well so let me readjust that okay we'll set up another take so just for everyone on the internet what I'm doing right here is going to this little arrow and I'm hitting new and it's giving me a new playli...

st and I am undoing that and I'm hitting duplicate cool just uh for a second sure much better wait okay, so I think that was better I think definitely do one more okay and then we'll have what we need on wood punching a couple things and be straight sounds good cool and I'm actually gonna turn my head foot up a little bit war good just so you know, I I upped the level of the song going to you okay, just play it real quick better wait no way should punch in the very beginning and very okay on dh just the very beginning going into the groove yeah, like the ride that you do at the beginning I think should be a little more sinks with the track, okay? And just established the beat a little better at the beginning and then the very end there's want to sink it a little more so other and that I was really killer. Like that one feel that you changed. Yeah. That's the nature of yeah, that was really cool. Shall we can't believe you're giving instruct it's weird? I can't believe it either. Honestly, cool. Ready? You want to try it without doing simple decoration and just filling into the groove? Or do you want that? No, the simple decorations really cool. Okay, I was a really killer, phil. All right, cool. Let me, uh, let me just find a spot. Teo, draw this back, okay, one want to just hear playback on, like three quarters of the way through and just come in I'll just play and okay I mean do you want stuff ringing in going into that last section do you want it to be like I think it should be ringing in just that sounds like a performance cool let me uh let me just say it everyone that should always be in quick punch mode uh let's do that again my bad and that is actually in the next slide theo it's pretty killer dude good. Yeah. So the reason that I said that should be in quick punch which I forgot about is because what happens what pro tools does? This is a reason to use pro tools is on and if you're dawes do this cool uh outside of pro tools the minute you hit play it starts recording so if you do a bad punch like I just did or I thought it was a bad punch sounded like a bad punch at the time you see that's a bad punch think it's pretty clear where the weak lincoln's here, buddy absolutely the gear what's up I'm sorry I didn't hear you. Can you explain exactly what you're doing even before you punched? I mean, I know we understand you're punching in and out but um in the beginning with the first punch of the beginning of the song in this absolutely okay so I felt like at the beginning of the song the uh the group just needed to come in a little stronger and that the ride needed to sink with the piano a little more so I just wanted to get that now ride rings for forever so I needed to let it go past where I actually needed it takes so I played it from the beginning so he would know where where was in the song and now you can you can on ly here that because of no cross fade which I am about the fix so I would recommend making a group for all the drums yes sir apple g is your friend is it the same in logic? Uh no, I don't know the key equivalent of logic it's why I do it on the mixing console okay, so I just hit apple g naming it drums I have it set to mix and edit and I goto attributes not follow the global's not the solos but definitely the record enables in the input enables this is just so that when I affect one drum track it effects the other ones in the exact same way. So as you can see the uh cross fade is now on all the drum tracks apple f let's see so I could still kind of hear that some drawing the punch a little bit further I heard that even more so I'm gonna yeah a little further back now that definitely could not do with analog you know you'd have to actually be cutting in on dh that's scary when you see the guy I bust out a razor blade I want to think about it the objective here is to make sure that everything rings the same way that it did before uh any symbol that's ringing out needs to be ringing and both takes the exact same way now right there that's it you want to get really ridiculous about it solo each track and you really know at that point um it's pretty good I just checked in the overheads not bad so that's probably good to go now if you notice I was dragging it to a snare hit that is almost always the rule of thumb you want to drag it to a place where something else happens besides the ring you don't want to have the cut happened halfway through the ring it's just way more likely that you're going to be able to tell it's just a rule of thumb I'll try putting it in a bad spot just to see what hard to do sometimes yeah just you can hear it in the bass drum when I'm doing that I usually blow the way form up a little bit goto overheads or crashes and then just put it next to kick and snare so you really you can visually see we're transient support are coming in and sustaining you can literally visually see the way form and where you need to. Yeah, and the thing I'll add to that is that yeah, zoom in, zoom in generally about that close and we'll get I don't want to cut off any transients, we'll get about that close on it and, um, the tracks that I don't care about and this is going to be covered in day three are the tom so there's, nothing ringing or any of the close symbol, mike said, there's nothing ringing, obviously there's a lot of ride happening care about preserving that, but I already know that going to manually gate a bunch of these symbols, meaning I'm going to cut out all the space in between the hits, so I really care if the punches uneven on a high track that's not going to be the oh, so that said let's, check out the ending. I could hear that punch get in a little closer. Stanley was almost cool, not the part, but the punch. Sometimes you can't go right up against the way form because that'll happen, you see the the previous year earlier? Yeah, so human, strangely enough, yeah, so basically with punching in there's, a couple of rules of thumb to follow in start ahead of where you're going to punch by like a good four to eight measures, whatever the drummer is comfortable with and have him play the previous beat that's really, really important so that whatever is happening in the previous beat crashes ringing over ride or whatever keeps on ringing because if you don't do that, you're going to hear the punch and it's going to be amateurs. Hell, and you're fired. Um the, uh, there's a few exceptions to that, where you khun punching right on a downbeat and it'll work, but in general, I like to punch in on a snare hit after the downbeat so that the transition into the next rift is smooth, so look like I did right here. Um, the punch was drawn to that snare hit that snare hit right there, phil, I personally like if I had drawn it to hear one be nearly slightly different feel between the two takes now with a drummer as consistent as shawn, this isn't as big of a deal because that takes care going to be a lot more a lot more like each other than a lot of other drummers. A lot of drummers, you're going to hear huge differences between that takes, um and that's that's why you have to have them playing into the beat punching it it's all about transitions in my opinion you've had to make sure that you can not here that there was a transition or a punch so we get to hear the song wait theo, wait cool just needs the sweetening yeah, totally something domesticating mixed and all that stuff we're a little out I mean, you know, we're just listening for the parts makes sense yeah, absolutely it sounds like a cohesive song at this point short but yeah, exactly but it sounds cohesive and at this point I think it would be safe to say you can edit this um and on this well, I'm going to talk about exactly how it add it on day three but we're going to say it's good to go so let's talk about key takeaways from the entire day tone pie tattoo it in your brain so important it'll save you too like in a situation like this, mr arms don't sound that bad not the best drum tones ever on the face of the planet, but we did it very, very fast and if we haven't been paying attention to all of those little details in the tone pie from the shells of the sticks of the mikes of the pre amps of the room or in who knows where we'd be right now after just a few hours of working on this probably not nearly this far I'm probably still messing around with tones or recorded something that's on far worse so what I just show you guys today is a process that we use that audio hammer and process that I know a lot of guys who recorded a high level use this doesn't really change uh your studio my change band might change budget might change but process really doesn't and I think to me the main thing is having a philosophy philosophy of flexibility when approaching tracking drummers every drummer is different and like I said before sean sounds one way on this set up you put a different drummer on there is that sound completely different even if you leave everything exactly the same it's just going to be different there's no way around it so so all the people who are asking about would you use this piece a gear that piece of gear this hoop with this drama's like I don't know try it and we'll see there's no telling that's why you should collect lots of drums was a drum equipment and learn about the drummers and the drums that you're using and uh yes you also talk about how technology is a tool and not a crutch I I think it's both yeah obviously but you should use it as a tool meaning drummer should do their homework as you saw we got through this very very fast uh you're right I think that did illustrate the point that the recording side of it should be the quickest part of you didn't do your homework is a drummer no way we'll be doing the rift by riff you know we've been in the river by well seven o'clock at night a lucky yeah right yeah and here until seven o'clock in the morning sometimes so the technology though did allow us to punch in easily like you illustrated we couldn't have done that back in nineteen ninety two we could do it now but again if he wasn't an awesome drummer this there's no way this could have happened this quickly or sound even close to this good so don't cut corners and don't let band members cut corners on you so you made it you now know how to record drums uh congratulations you guys are all going to make gold records now so super job sauli gold stars for everybody yeah so I should probably do a little bit of q and a for a minute or to lovett do have anything from the room on this whole day yeah, I kind of have an overlying question about the creation of an an album like a full piece of work and I was just wondering besides the physical drums on a song per song basis how much do you experiment with like different drums were microphones or preempts or is it usually for an album you kind of have a set drum sound and just stick with that for the whole album? Well, it depends on the band I know that if you have a band like cynic or ah, I know that opec did this on ah, few their records it's not uncommon to have two completely different setups. I mean, I don't know that that's ever happened you just just saying that bands that are very dynamic in nature yeah, we have time and we want to experiment with stuff a little out of the times. What we'll do is we'll just throw up different snare drums even just even if we're loving the sound and throw something up this just different in that you know, because snare drums kind of a really identifiable main chunk of a drum kit and then sometimes swap out some symbols you know what I mean? Put up a splash or a different shine or something that sizzles or you know what I mean? Different ride? Yeah, yeah that's that's common even if not to the point of changing out the entire drum set changing out snares per song some by song basis that's normal changing out the rise the effect symbols that's totally normal and should definitely be taken on album by album song was sung basis and it's up to your time and what you're working yeah, totally if you don't have the time to do it, then you got to get it done, you got to get it done, but, you know, it is cool toe to have a few options, and again, that goes back to doing your homework. If drummer knows his stuff and you know your stuff, then you already know that a certain reid is going to sound a certain way and it's going to probably work for a certain part, you don't need to really experiment about it that much, so you can try even if that you know now on days you're having thirty inputs, a lot of the times you can use the different room mikes in the different configurations to actually give each tune a different sound, even though it's the same kid absolutely no, so you can make it homogeneous that way, you don't want it to sound draft lee, you know, like I don't know, like kid a or something where it's like every song, is literally like different or even real drums, but I mean, those air some of the ways you know, that you can kind of change or drum sound without literally swapping out the, you know, days and hours that you spent tweaking and getting everything you know set up set up the way it sounds the best because I mean how easy is it to swap out symbols you know how easy is it is too shut off room mike's in one section of a song and then you know put them in a verse or literally take them out of one tune or you know what I mean different colors absolutely I always record multiple sets of room mike's like I said typically there will be a stereo pair behind the kit like reuters or something amano behind the kit getting the length of the room sometimes will put four fourteen's on the floor right uh I guess exactly where the reuters would be but in front of in front of the kid you eighty sevens in the middle of the room sometimes for for teens all the way at the back like we try all kinds of things and yeah it's good to get if you have the inputs record as many room mice is possible because right there you have all the tonal options in the world and we recorded traced in there we brought tom's into the bathroom because it was an all tile bathroom did sections of stuff overdose where it was like, you know, using recording in the bathroom at that for me you know, just experience you can if you can experiment with that stuff because you never know you know, having a mike that's literally just outside the tracking room is just picking up some weird low end or something or even having a mike in like a drum bag or so you just weird that you never know what you're going to get with some of those qualities and they can really change a production kind of one of the strangest ones that of jason suk office assistant came up with was having an sm fifty seven pointed at the inside of a crash at the end of the room that was pointed at the drum set so it kind of was almost like a parabolic mike like that at the back of the room sounded awesome um so yeah, if you could do that go for it the one that's we're talking about just so that everybody kind of took to frame everything we did here today is how far is this set up from the one you usually employ at audio hammer regarding mike's preempts conversion and room well, the room is obviously not the same room. Yeah that's my room that is that is the actual drum room at audio hammer with trump's for white chapel, right? Yeah, those were the white chapel drums so you can see the difference between they're in here or it's actually a very similar set up however there's bottom tom mike's there's some fifty seven on the bottom uh and every single symbol, every single symbol is miked up there's the roy er room mike's behind the kit. I mean, it's, just a bigger version of what I did here. Ah, this if I had, that may be what, six more hours would have finished my king the entire kit, but we just didn't have the time, so we had to get it done. So again, it's, you know, we're showing the same processes just we don't have much time. We don't have as many inputs. Yeah, but it's the same process? Yeah hasn't looked at me different from what you've got there. I've got a p I thirty one twenty force. I've got twelve channels so that I don't have need ten, seventy three's, but I have in tech for seventy three's, which are modeled after that so it's not that different of a rig, the summit audios, apparently very clean, though. Uh, I don't really get to check it out and focus rights that I've got her very clean. So who knows? It's ah, it's, a similar rig just a lot smaller way more input at all you have.