“Temproblems”

In our last article we talked about the click track and the various problems it presents to drummers. Production-wise, we also discussed the importance of capturing the groove and keeping good time. To summarize, we noted the following drummer-specific issues:

• Drummers will tend to play the verses slow, and slightly speed up on the choruses.
• They will slowly speed up towards the end of the song. Play back the song right after it ends and you’ll immediately notice this.
• Every drum fill they do will slightly shift the tempo either forward or backwards in time, depending on the complexity of the fill.

Today we expand the topic to discuss the rest of the issues an engineer struggles with when recording drummers.

Cymbals, cymbals, and still more cymbals…

Record producers will almost always agree that what primarily separates an amateur from a pro is how much cymbals the drummer is hitting, and this is generally true regardless of genre. Consummate drummers will use crash and ride punctuations sparingly. Notable examples are the drumming styles of The Eagles’ Don Henley and U2’s Larry Mullen. These guys will actually make you *wait* for their cymbal hits!

A fellow audio engineer of mine told me once that cymbals are like exclamation points. You do not want all your sentences to end with them. Nice metaphor, eh?

Hit the lights! (and mic the overheads)

Another issue regarding cymbals is how hard the drummer hits them. Drums are usually miked with a stereo overhead pair, in addition to individual mics placed on each drum piece. And if you’re like me, in most cases, the overheads are my primary mics, i.e., I use them to capture a balanced sound of the whole kit (and not just the cymbals). This can be quite difficult to accomplish, given that the cymbals are obviously the nearest things to these two mics. (This is actually a huge subject that requires a separate article of its own.) But what makes it even more frustrating is the fact that most drummers will hit the cymbals harder than they would hit the toms and the snare! When this happens, the drum sound becomes a mad wash of searing treble coming from the crash and the hi-hats. (Blink-182 anyone?) This is perhaps the recording engineer’s worst nightmare. Yaiks!

The really good players never play like this. They know how to control their touch, and they would hit the drums really solidly, and the cymbals oh so lightly.

(Our focus in this post is about drummer problems. And so we will discuss the nuts and bolts about drum miking techniques in some other article soon.)

Even Steven

And speaking of touch, there is one more related problem. No drummer can hit the drums perfectly even, and while again, this is what makes the playing “human”, we engineers desire the individual hits to be as constant in volume as possible (except of course for sections where let’s say a soft hit is intended).

The best drummers will always have the most consistent drum hits. And one more critical thing: they will almost always hit the drum skins in exactly the same location (which is ideally the very center of the drum surface). As you may know, hitting the drum skin at different places will change the tone and timbre of the hit, and nothing is more amateurish than a drummer whose snare hits all sound different tonally. It sounds like a horrible mess.

As an example, try to pay attention whenever a drummer makes a fill. Again, depending on how complex the fill is, he will usually trade-off complexity with how hard the drum is hit, and where. The busier the fill, in general, the lighter the drum hits become, and the more off-center the hit is made. Thus when the drummer comes back to the basic beat, the snare would sound louder, compared to the snare hits during the fill.

Regarding differences in volume, or velocity as it’s called, engineers will summon from their arsenal the ubiquitous compressor, whose primary purpose is to reduce the dynamic range (i.e., the loudest and softest hits) of the track. This way, we control the big differences in volume of the drum hits, resulting into a more professional-sounding drum track. Engineers would automatically compress the kick, snare, and tom mics as they are being recorded.

(Similarly, we will forego discussing related stuff here like drum tuning and using compressors in a drum setting in future posts.)

Name that tune!

This last item doesn’t really concern about mechanical aspects but rather about style. Let’s talk about fills for a moment again… Seasoned pros will usually think hard about what fill he needs to do for certain sections of the song. He would play the same exact fill for verse sections that lead to another verse section, another one for verse sections leading to the chorus, and another one for chorus sections leading back to the verse. Sometimes he would put little variations, but he would always stick to the same fill template. This way not only the song has an identity, but also the drum track itself. He would never do random fills here and there.

Incidentally, this is one essential production philosophy for Nile Rodgers, who produced megahits like Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and “Material Girl”, Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” and “Wild Boys”, the B-52’s “Love Shack” and “Roam”, and so many other great 80’s albums. He also happens to be Chic’s guitar player.

Some drummers I really admire are masters at this. In his concert DVD, John Mayer has said that Steve Jordan’s style is unmistakable: anyone will be able to recognize what song he’s playing just by hearing the drum track.

Confucius said…

Drummers are a unique bunch of musicians. Sure they keep time, but by being so used to play ever-so-slightly ahead of everybody else in the band all their lives, they are not used to “follow a master”, like when they are suddenly asked to play to a click track. And many will concentrate on playing technique, and emulate master technicians like Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy or Rush’s Neal Peart. But for us recording engineers, pyrotechnics is just one thing, and the most primitive playing aspects are still the most important: keeping time, making the song groove, the drummer’s touch, and consistency in hitting the drum pieces. Perhaps these things are also the most difficult to master.

Well, that’s all for today folks. Ooops, but we didn’t really tell you how we should fix all these problems yet, did we? LOL!

Supplementary reading

In Use Crash Cymbals Sparingly, the author likens cymbal hits to cursing. According to him, if you curse all the time, then no one will care anymore.

The Prorec article Drum Miking Techniques pt. 2 discusses some basic overhead miking techniques.

Drum Tuning Bible is perhaps the definitive guide for tuning drums.

In How to compress the snare and kick drum, basic drum compression techniques are discussed.

The blog site Troy’s Drum Tips for Young Drummers is an excellent resource for beginning drummers for everything related to the craft.

Meet the metronome

Nope, I’m not spoofing Hamlet, I’m actually talking about this little contraption… As you may know, the metronome is a device that creates audible pulses at regular intervals of time, in order to establish a steady tempo in the performance of music. It can be this antique wooden thingy that looks like an inverted pendulum clock, or its more modern electronic version, or even the ephemeral tick-tock you only get to hear on studio headphones.

Metronomes are used by serious musicians to aid in their practice regimen, usually to instill a strict discipline of maintaining a constant tempo when playing their instruments. The objective here is to keep accurate time. For instance, violinists use the metronome to constantly push their playing abilities. They will practice difficult lines very slowly at first, and then set the metronome faster and faster until they can play the same line cleanly and accurately at lightning speed.

Why record to a click track?

We humans are notoriously unable to keep good time. As an example, most drummers will have three common problems:

• At the beginning of the song, drummers will play the beat at a certain tempo, but during the chorus parts, they will usually speed up, only to slow down again when the verse comes back.
• In most cases, they will almost always unknowingly play faster towards the end of the song (unless it’s something that’s done intentionally, e.g., Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Meeting of the Spirits”).
• Depending on complexity, any improvised drum fills done on the last beat of the measure (let’s say the “4” in 4/4 time) will either take a slightly longer or shorter time to return to the “1” of the next measure.

Recording process and philosophy

For a typical recording session, one of the very first things that is done is that the tempo for the song is determined, and click tracks are prepared either via a simple metronome, or programmed via software inside the DAW. Then guide tracks are recorded, with the drums being one of the first instruments that are actually printed (since drums carry the rhythm of the song). Drummers who are not used to playing to a click track will never be able to sync to this beat, however hard they try, and the end result will always be a disaster: a drum track that for all intents is unusable.

Now, as a solution, you decide to let the drummer play without a click, but now the big question comes: Can he keep good time?

There is a reason why session players are paid handsomely, and only these very few can do it with class. Really. Think about the groove masters like Manu Katche, Billy Cobham, Jeff Porcaro, or Steve Jordan.

Producers debate endlessly about click-tracking… On one camp, they believe that fluctuations in tempo are natural and actually help the music, in that small tempo increases build up tension and excitement, while corresponding decreases provide emotional release. On the other hand, the other camp believes that the best musicians keep perfect time, and unless the music is supposed to be played rubato (i.e., free-time, flexible tempo), then it should always be played as precise in time as can be.

But maybe even playing to a click track is not enough, and some crazy producers take their obsessions too far…

Bar-beat editing

In this day and age, it is possible to edit drum tracks that were already recorded such that they are made perfectly aligned in time. This is done quite easily in Pro Tools. Tools such as Beat Detective and Elastic Audio can automatically quantize drum hits all the way up to the 16th note! (There is actually a dangerous trend happening lately with the overuse of bar-beat editing, especially with bands whose drummers are not known to play great time!) Now, even the sloppiest drumming can be made tempo-perfect, and while for some this is good, for the rest this means taking away the emotion from the playing. Not to mention that this is also a quick and dirty way to hide poor playing skills! And you thought Auto-Tune was the only scourge of our generation!

And this is the answer…

I think that there is no final answer to the question above. It takes a lot of maturity and good taste from the producer to determine which option works better for the task at hand. The ideal situation for me is a good drummer who can play and groove to a click track, but bar-beat editing? Forget it man!

The groove is a much sought-after human element to playing, but even a bitchin’ groove is never tempo-accurate. I mean, if I just wanted the perfect drum track, I would just use MIDI and feed it to BFD! Why should I squeeze a human player to do something that is technically impossible?

In the end, I think that what distinguishes man from machine is ironically the very thing that he wants to achieve: machine perfection. If some mortal can somehow do this, then it will be the ultimate contradiction, because now, he will sound as perfect and lifeless as MIDI.

Having said this, though, I still believe that the best musicians are the ones who can groove and play good time. The pursuit to playing perfection should always be top priority for every serious musician. As Steve Vai has said, “I’m fearless in my heart. They will always see that in my eyes. I am the passion; I am the warfare. I will never stop… always constant, accurate, and intense.”

Examples, opinion, and analysis

And finally, here are some classic examples:

• AC/DC’s Back in Black, produced by Mutt Lange, did not use a click track at all. It was all played in free-time, believe it or not!
• For Nirvana’s In Utero, Steve Albini takes the recording philosophy above one step further… Aside from no click tracks whatsoever, most of the songs were tracked with the whole band playing at once. It’s all live, raw, and it burns!
• George Martin and Geoff Emerick used a click track on the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”, but only in order to sync the open middle parts where the orchestra is supposed to come in. You can actually hear Ringo counting in this section!
• Tempo analysis of Green Day’s American Idiot appears to indicate that the whole album was heavily bar-beat edited to fine perfection. Maybe that’s why it hits me hard but somehow I feel it doesn’t groove at all…

With these examples, do you think the songs groove and burn, or were they sloppy bad? Maybe our opinions here will all be different. Try to listen and feel the songs like a consummate musician. Go figure!

For additional reading, please check out the following links:

• In Be gone ye click track! | Drummer Talk, the author talks about the groove that he believes only happens when the click track is not used at all.
• In the forum entry Click Tracks, the poster talks about some philosophy as utilized by producer/engineer Michael Wagener.
• In the article In search of the click track – Boing Boing, the author uses software to identify whether click tracks and bar-beat editing were employed on certain songs, in this case, the Beatles’ “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and Green Day’s “American Idiot”.
• The article Make: Online : Click track detector makes a similar analysis as above, this time, the same Green Day song and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, which reveals that Lars Ulrich could’ve played the song without using a click.
• Who Uses A Click Track? Music Machinery Doesn’t Really Tell You! – Musformation does a more comprehensive analysis of the above.
• In the article In search of the click track « Music Machinery, which is similar to the above analyses, it is spectacular to see which drummer did the wildest tempo variations of the bunch. (It was in fact the great John Bonham!) (Edit: I noticed later on that this is in fact the parent article of all the other ones above! Sorry for that Mr. Author.)

All the best!