Varanger NPOE Drums | A kick like a.. basketball?

Drums

Geoff Kirchoff

In this installment I'll take you through as much as I remember about the recording of these drums played be the AMAZING Geoff Kirchoff (Seriously this guy is a monster on drums)

Here we go... We did the recordings for the drums at Tyler, the Vocalist/Guitarist of Varanger and a good friend. Little did Tyler know these drums would be stuck in his living room for a few weeks. (I swear we are much faster about everything now, keep in mind this was my first major production).

This was when I got to put my new toy's to the test. An Antelope audio zen Quadro interface and a Focusrite Octo-pre. I remember saving up quite a bit for that interface but man was it worth it. I could plug my Octo-pre into it via ADAT and suddenly I had more channels.

It was the first time I felt semi-professional having all those channels. I was just starting out and Luckily Geoff Kirchoff supplied some microphones. The Audix DP7 Plus drum mic kit. Plus an old Sm57 I had laying around. Every good studio needs at least one.

Above is a photo of our mic setup... let than ideal but I'd be lying if it didnt capture a certain.. magic. The mic setup was pretty standard honestly. I had those mics running right into my octo-pre setup and into a computer we had setup in another room. I remember these sessions well. They were often early morning or dead late at night as I had the worst hours at work during those months and everyone's schedules only lined up on those hours.

During recording we had some issues getting to kick to sound huge. Now believe me "Ruby" sounds fucking massive but we just wanted to push it to 11 for this album. So we added an exterior sub kick mic. To catch the low frequencies coming from the porthole.

We thought of this last minute and so we had no more mic stands... so we had to improvise...

Yeahhh... I’ll let you be the judge of that. And it doesnt even end there. Actually that mic barely even makes it in the final mix. What really did it was a.. basketball. Yeah, we blended a basket ball into the final mix and it really gave us both a unique "click" and thump. This Basketball is a special one.. Gerard, I’ll have to do a whole blog on the importance of Gerard and terrorizing Tyler with it.

But anyhow yeah, it was recorded in chunks throughout the course of a month. Maybe longer, I’m bad at remembering exact dates. Anyhow the point is we got it done despite the learning curve.

The shells had quite a bit of sampling added to them but that’s mainly because again, first production but also the sub-optimal space only allowed for one specific sound.. It’s not a bad sound but we were limited.

I find that drums are the most difficult thing to get to sit right in the mix and it all stems from leveling them. Typically I start with the kick. I like to layer everything off it when I work because it’s sort of the heartbeat of the entire song. Next I get the snare to sit just above that in relation to the mix. I love a good snare that cracks through the instruments.

Then comes the cymbals. This is super important to get right cause in a way it defines a good part of the overall mix. Too harsh and things sound kinda spiked and unpleasant. Too little and it starts sounding cheap and inauthentic and it lives up in the high frequencies, above most instruments.

Going back I would have loved to attack these drum sessions with more of a "plan". Especially at this time, I was just going off theory and less actual experience. Honestly I'm thankful this was my first big production because I had to learn everything for the first time.

One huge thing I learned is pre-production is more important than the production itself in a lot of ways. For example if you just set up the mics and hit record, you could get lost later on down the line.

What I should have done is sat with the drummer, make a midi map of the drums, then have the rest of the band throw down some scratch tracks to that specific drum recording. That way you don't have to retrofit things. Its typically much better if the whole recording is built over the drums

BONUS

Heres Geoff doing a little trick.

Heres a fun little setup we had later in the sessions for a song that at the time of writing this has not been released. We had to cut it from the album unfortunately.
I'm sure it'll see the light of day eventually....