Nine songs, four piece rock band, drummer is genuinely good but our practice room is about three metres square with a low ceiling and I have eight inputs at home. Everything else we can track ourselves and we have time but not much money. A local place does a day rate with an engineer and a tuned kit already miked. Is one day enough to be worth it, or do we keep programming and spend the money on mixing?
Disagreeing with the pay for a day consensus. Modern sampled drums with a real drummer performing them on pads or programmed carefully with velocity and timing variation are genuinely fine, and half the records people cite as sounding live have heavy sample reinforcement anyway. If your budget is one thing, I would put it into someone mixing the record properly. A great mix of programmed drums beats an average mix of real drums recorded in a rush.
Did programmed drums for one album and a studio day for the next, same band, same songs in some cases. What the day actually buys you is not the microphones, it is the kit being tuned by someone who does it every week, a room with height, and a drummer playing to the rest of the band instead of to a click in isolation.
The second album sounds like a band. The first sounds like a very well produced demo. Nobody outside the band ever said the word drums about either one, they just liked the second one more and could not say why.
The nobody could say why line is exactly the fear. Booking a day and doing four songs.
Record the drums out, everything else at home. That is where nearly every band on a small budget lands, and it is the right answer for a reason.
Numbers, because day rate maths catches people out. A ten hour day realistically gets you setup and sounds for the first ninety minutes, then three songs done properly with a couple of alternates, maybe four if the band is drilled and the arrangements are locked. Not nine.
So you are either booking two or three days, or picking the three songs where the drums carry the track and programming the rest. We did the second and I would do it again. Also: turn up with the arrangements finalised and tempos decided. Every band that walks in still arguing about a bridge is buying an expensive rehearsal.
Adding to this: send the engineer rough mixes with a click a week before. Ours had the session templates and rough headphone mixes ready when we arrived and it saved most of an hour.
Yes, and agree the headphone mix in advance. More studio time is lost to the drummer not being able to hear the bass than to anything technical.
Middle option nobody mentions: hire a hall or a rehearsal room with a high ceiling for a morning, bring your own eight inputs and a borrowed kit, and record the drums yourself. Four mics done well in a room with height beats twelve mics in a three metre box. We did a village hall for the price of two takeaways and the overheads are the best drum sound we have ever got.
@slowtrainjo · 4mo ago
We booked a day with a band that had not rehearsed to a click and got one and a half songs out of it. The drummer had never played to a metronome for a whole take before and it fell apart around the tempo pushes. If you go, spend the two weeks before playing to a click every rehearsal, and do not discover on the day that your songs speed up in the choruses.
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