If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time re-educating your interns and assistant engineers. Recording school is great and all, but as you know, there are a ton of things we do in the real world that you can’t learn at any school. For example, something that we spend a ton of time on Audiohammer Studios: recording, editing and mixing modern drums.
On January 16-18, I’ll be teaching a class called “Advanced Drum Production” on creativelive.com, where I’ll be covering everything there is to know about recording, editing and mixing modern drums—we’re not holding ANYTHING back, and to my knowledge, there is literally nowhere else in the world you can learn this stuff. While I mostly work with metal bands, the material will apply to any genre.
This is everything you wish your interns would know when they walk into the studio on day one, and it’s free to watch live streaming, so check it out if you want to save yourself some time and headaches. Oh, and if you’re a metal fan, you’ll be excited to hear that Sean Reinert (Cynic, Death, etc) will be our session drummer!
Day 1: Recording Drums
As we all know, getting great raw tones is the foundation for everything, and we’re going to show them everything they need to know to get great sounds from the source. We’ll cover every piece of the puzzle that is drum tone: the drums themselves, mics, pres, the room, and the player—all in exhaustive detail and with no compromises. Because in real life, getting great tones means no cutting corners. Ever.
Day 2: Virtual Drums
There’s no substitute for a great drummer, but let’s be real—we aren’t always fortunate enough to work with a great drummer. If it’s between a crappy real drummer and an amazing virtual drummer, I’ll choose the later. We all know programming drums isn’t exactly a cakewalk; however, you can get album quality tracks out of this plug-in if you do the work. I’ll show how we integrate Toontrack’s Superior Drummer into our day to day workflow.
Day 3: Editing/Mixing
Once you have your tracks (whether from acoustic or virtual drums), the next steps are mixing, editing, and all the other little things we do in the box that take it from A to an A+. I know this is the part a lot of kids will be especially excited about—from editing with Beat Detective to the secrets of sample replacement/layering and various approaches to compression, EQ, and reverb, I’ll be covering it all!
Sign up for the class on creativelive.com. Your interns don’t have to be completely clueless when they walk in.
