Garage drums.

I’ve been playing music with Eric McGinty for two decades now. Our band the Exhibit(s) has recorded a couple of albums, and Eric worked on the music for several of my film projects. (You can listen to our albums on Bandcamp here and here, and you can check out Hide and Creep if you’d like to hear some of Eric’s film scoring work.)

Eric and I have been talking about recording another (very overdue) Exhibit(s) album, plus maybe a side project album, so I’ve been thinking about recording drums. The obvious way to record drums is to go to a professional studio and pay a professional engineer to record the drums. But that kind of stresses me out. Drums are generally the foundation of rock music recordings, which means the drums need to be recorded first. And given that I am not the most consistent drummer, I worry about wasting everybody’s time and money while they wait for me to get my parts recorded correctly.

I can’t record drums at home because I live in an apartment, and I am sure my neighbors would rightfully complain about the noise. But my parents live in rural central Alabama, and they have a garage. Which isn’t acoustically treated or whatever, but it’s a big room where I can play drums. And I have Logic Pro software for the Mac, which (as the name implies) is a professional audio recording app.

One thing I don’t have is a bunch of expensive microphones. But! Logic Pro has a cool feature where you can replace drum sounds with professional drum samples. Basically your real drum tracks serve as triggers, and Logic Pro replaces them with professionally-recorded drum sounds. This works for the bass drum, the snare drum, and the tom-toms. So the only thing I have to actually record well in-the-room is the cymbals.

Shure makes a microphone called the SM-57 that is an industry-standard all-around instrument mic. But those are about $100 a piece, and I didn’t want to spend that kind of money when I don’t need super high-quality sound, since I’m planning to replace the sounds anyway. I found these “WM57” microphones that are… well, they’re basically bootleg SM-57 mics. And they’re like $15 each. Which is an insanely low price for a functional mic.

I went down to my folks’ garage and did some test recordings, and I was pleased to find out that, at least for tom-toms and snare, these not-SM-57s sound pretty good. I mean, for the price they sound amazing. But I honestly don’t know if I could tell the difference between them and the real thing. Obviously I need to borrow a real SM-57 and do a side-by-side recording comparison, but that’s a project for another day.

Here’s a short snippet of what I recorded on my first day of drum recording tests in the garage. Sloppy playing aside, the sound is pretty good. My main gripe with this test is I only had a single mic to record the cymbals. So the cymbals are in mono with a fake stereo effect added. Based on positive reviews, I ordered a pair of cymbal mics for $60 (that’s $30 per mic), so I can record my cymbals in stereo next time. If these $30 mics work as good for cymbals as the $15 mics do for drums, I’ll be thrilled. Hopefully I’ll get back to the garage sooner rather than later and take the cymbal mics for a test drive.

UPDATE: To answer a few very good questions from my pal Andrew Bellware over on Mastodon… in the snippet below, I used Logic Pro to replace the kick and snare sounds. The overhead (cymbals) mic is an Audio Technica large-diaphragm condenser. The (few) tom-tom sounds are the originals, from those WM-57 mics. My pre-amp is an old Focusrite eight-input FireWire (!) interface.

Chance Shirley · Drum Test (for Blog)

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