So I just have a modest little bedroom studio, nothing too serious. But I put in a lot of time trying to get the best drum recordings I could get with it. So I did some reading up on the subject, watched a bunch of videos, talked to some veterans in the game, and just played around with different drums, microphones and their placements, processessing techniques, etc. until I finally got a sound that I really like.

For the actual drumset, I started with one of those Ludwig Questlove Breakbeats kits since the sound I was going for was what you'd generally hear in a lot of old drum break samples. What I learned is that there are essentially a few different types of drumkits that you might assemble based on the genre of music you're doing. So the kind I got is generally used in old school R&B, Funk, and Jazz. Actually, from what I've seen, they're usually referred to as Jazz Kits. I think that's mainly because they usually have smaller kick drums and fewer toms so they can fit in venues where Jazz musicians might be playing. Then you've got Rock kits that seem to usually have much bigger kick drums, more toms, etc. Gospel Kits seem to usual be pretty big and have really bright sounding cymbals. You've probaly seen Metal setups with double pedals on the kick and all kinds of stuff. But yeah, I just went with the Jazz kit.

Pretty much all the drums in my kit have wooden shells, which is pretty common, but for the snare, I went for one with a metal shell. The metal gives it a kinda 'sharper' tone than wood. I wouldn't say one type is particuarly better than the other but I kinda wanted what you'd hear in a lot of 70's r&b and heard that a lot of them used metal snares to get that sound so that's what I went with. Sometimes I use the wooden snare too. I feel like it's a smoother, warmer sound but it doesn't cut through mixes as easily as the metal one. But to really get the 'snappiness' from the snare without a lot of the tone ringing, the secret is just to lay something over the top of the snare. I've done this with wallets, moon gels, bandanas, literally anything. But what I've found works best for the type of sound I've been going for lately is a washcloth. But yeah, as you can see, I've got various pieces of cloth laying on the drums to kinda 'deaden' the sound so you basially just mostly get the transients from them and not a lot of ringing tone when they're hit.

The cymbals are a whole different thing since they don't come with the base of the drumset at all. So I did a little digging to find out which kind would match up good with a jazz kit and give me that 'breakbeat' kinda 'dark' sound instead of the really bright cymbal sound that you kinda hear in a lot of rock, or gospel drum tracks. So I ended up going with Zildjian Custom K Darks. I'm pretty happy with how they sound. I tried a few other cymbals before that (honestly can't remember what they even were exactly because they were a mixture of used ones I picked up at pawn shops and used music gear stores), but the Custom Ks turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.

One thing I gotta mention, is that I went through this whole thing with the kick not really punching through the mix like I wanted it to. This might be because it's kinda small, but I heard a lot of other recordings that "I think" used similar sized kicks and they got theirs to punch so I knew there had to be a way. I almost wanted mine to sound a bit 'sampled'... almost electronic like a TR-909 kick in that I didn't want it to have a lot of 'tail' on it. Just a solid thump. At one point I tried stuffing it with a pillow or a sheet, and it kinda worked but it made it sound kinda lackluster.

What ended up giving me that sound was using a specific drum head. It's an Evan's EMAD dampening system that goes on the batter head (the side that the beater is hitting). It basically has these foam rings that you can add to the drumhead that let's you deaden the tone to a more specific degree. And I got the resonant head version of that too (the side facing away from the drummer). For that one, I got one with a hole in it so I could put the mic kinda inside the drum and get a bit more of the thump from the beater. At some point, I might put another mic on the batter head to get even more of that sound, but for now it's sounding just right.

One little secret though... to get the kick sounding unnaturally thumpy, what I do is use some eq to roll off the really boomy frequecies past about 200Hz, to leave headroom for the actual thump 'frequencies' (from around 250-3000Hz), then process it with some kinda tube distortion to beef up those frequenices that really make it punch through even more. For this, I've mainly been using Waves BB tubes, but the Waves J37 Tape plugin works good for this too. I also recently started using some of the Universal Audio stuff like the Oxide Tape Recorder and the Ampex ATR-102 and I like the sound I get from them too. I actually like to put those on the whole drum bus to warm up the whole drum track.

So, as far as the microphone selection, I went with an Audix D6 sticking into the hole in the resonant head of the kick, two Shure SM-57s for the snare top and bottom. And yeah, just in case you didn't know, you really have to mic the top and bottom of the snare in order to get the tone from the top of it and the snap from the snare wires on the bottom. Sometimes you have to reverse the phase of one of those recordings though because you can end up with weird phase issues. I don't think I have problems with that but it's worth noting in case something sounds weird when you layer the top and bottom snare recordings. Then for the toms I've got one Shure SM-58 on the high tom and an another SM-57 on the low one. Like I mentioned before, my kit only has two toms so micing them up isn't too complex. Then for the cymbals, I've got another Shure SM-58 on the hi-hat, then the rest of them I'm just letting be covered by the 'room mics', which are are a matched pair of Lewitt LCT-140s. The room mics give a good stereo recording of the whole set. This lets me dial in how much room sound (natural reverb) I want and since they're condensers, they basically capture everything. All the other mics are dynamic which are great for capturing the transients without really having to worry too much about clipping. But yeah, the condensers help really capture the 'shine' of the cymbals and the ambience of the whole kit.

So, putting that all together, I end up with a good starting drum track sound that I can kinda tweak a bit based on the song. On some songs I might want the kick to stand out a bit more, on some it might be the cymbals, or whatever. But that's all basically taken care of in the mix. On most of the free samples that I post here, I'm gonna try to keep the mix as balanced as possible so whoever downloads them can tweak them a little bit more to their liking. The only thing I'm really doing is putting some mix-bus compression on them to glue the whole kit together and a tiny bit of tape saturation so they sound warmer and cut through mixes a bit better. I'm gonna also be giving out stems to people on my mailing list so you can really get the mix how you want.

To download the latest samples, you can go to my shop page and just add these to your cart and checkout. For any free stuff, there's no card info needed. I just need your email address so I know where to send the link. And don't worry, I won't add your email to any mailing list or anything unless you opt in for that. There's no pressure to do it but I am gonna be sending out a lot more exclusive samples and stems for people who sign up for that. I can't give out ALL the sauce publicly so subcribe to the list if you're interested in all that.