Drums and Basslines...

Been spending a fair amount of time doing drum editing for the first few tracks of this next album.  It’s really quite an involved process.  When a live drummer is recorded, there are multiple microphones placed at different locations in close proximity to the kit (for example, there are separate mics placed on the inside and the outside of the kick drum, at the top and the bottom of the snare, etc), and further away in the studio.  The tracks each microphone separately records have to “work” together so that the entire set properly captures the performance. 

With each strike of a kick, snare, tom or cymbal, the resulting audio waveform contains a component referred to as a “transient”, which is the focal point of the strike.  The remainder of the waveform surrounding that transient generally represents the trailing edge of the sound (i.e., the natural sound decay that flows from the initial strike).  In contrast with a drum machine, a human drummer will not strike every beat with absolute perfect timing (after all, we’re not machines) – so one task of a sound engineer will be to slightly modify the timing of these transients so that any inaccuracies that are noticeable enough to detract from the consistency of the performance are corrected.  Since multiple microphones capture each strike from different distances, it’s important to ensure that any such editing remains consistent across those multiple tracks.

This is all part of being a “producer”, which I’m learning how to do on the fly!

As I mentioned earlier, Robbie Malone is performing the basslines for this album.  He’s completed the first few tracks to date, and from what I can ascertain, he seems to take a much more creative/melodic approach to generating basslines than what you might typically experience with most bassists.  One of the tracks on the new record, called “Dreams”, has a bit of a swing feel to it.  What I immediately noticed in listening to the bassline Robbie generated was that it was not in complete lockstep with the kick drum, as you might typically expect with most pop/rock recordings.  Rather, it (as Robbie described it) somewhat danced around the kick, lending a much more syncopated feel to the entire track.

I’ve uploaded the work-in-progress for “Dreams” to the subscriber section; feel free to drop a line and let me know what you think!

My best,

-Eddie