Musician Articles

For a few styles of electronic music, ‘real’ drum sounds play no part. But for most music-makers in the mainstream, the sound of an acoustic drum kit played by a real drummer — whether left in its natural state or processed, chopped up and looped — forms an integral part of the mix.

There’s little argument that, in situations where you want the sound of real drums, the ideal would be a world-class drummer with a van-load of different kits, set up in a large studio that’s booked out indefinitely, with a team of tame engineers on hand to sort out the messy business of miking the kit correctly. For many of us, that’s a pipe dream, and I’m not just talking about home studios. From scores and soundtracks to commercial releases, the constraints of time and budget imposed by the current climate mean that traditional recording sessions — with musicians and producer all in the same place at the same time — are much less common that they used to be. Similarly, larger studios designed for big sessions are dwindling in number, while there are probably more small production rooms currently in use than ever before.

So, when the ideal is unattainable, what are we to do? One approach is to use a session musician remotely: someone who has their own recording space set up and ready to go, who can record their parts themselves and then send them over to be incorporated in your mix. The modern marvels of Skype, email, WeTransfer and the World Wide Web have made this process much easier, and typing “remote session drummer” or “online session drums” into Google turns up pages and pages of hits. You can take your pick of session drummers all over the world, with advertised prices ranging from $75 per track to considerably more.

An alternative is to use sampled, programmed drums. Technological advances have had an even more radical effect here, with sample libraries becoming ever bigger and more detailed, with high-definition audio, multiple mic options and abundant multisampling. At the same time, a new generation of ‘intelligent’ virtual drummer software, beginning with Steinberg’s Groove Agent and continuing with Pro Tools’ Strike and Logic’s Drummer, will take care of much of the programming for you. If you believe the hype, we’re tantalisingly close to not needing flesh-and-blood drummers at all, with perfectly recorded sounds and totally convincing performances available on tap, all inside the box.

However, although we may be close, we’re not there yet. Judging by my own experience of using programmed drums and virtual drummer software, and the feelings of many producers I’ve talked to, it often feels like there’s something missing. So perhaps it’s time to look at the first option again. With that in mind, I recruited top session drummer Alex Reeves and three producers, to compare his services with the results they could get from virtual drum software.

Session Man

Alex Reeves has a lengthy CV that’s as varied as it is impressive. He’s toured and played live with Dizzee Rascal, Bat For Lashes, Anna Calvi and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. His session work takes in just about ever major recording studio in the UK, most recently playing on Guy Garvey’s forthcoming solo album at Real World. From his own Drum Fortress studio, a modestly sized but well-equipped room in the Fortress Studios recording and rehearsal complex in central London, he has provided remote session services to the likes of Nick Cave, NAS, Bobby Womack, Chase N Status, Avicii and UNKLE, not to mention music for commercials, video games, TV and film. His standard rates for remote recording — $230 per track or $460 per day — are higher than some, but reflect the breadth and depth of his experience.

Part of the appeal of the remote session approach is that it has made very good professional players accessible for anyone to use in their productions. For Alex, offering his services in this way was simply a natural step. “I’m of an age where I didn’t start out recording in the major studios,” he explains. “When this kind of recording started is roughly when I started recording, 15 years ago. Major-league recording was starting to wind down in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and the studios were starting to work in a different way. So I grew up playing a lot of this stuff in my own studio.

“I started out with an Akai S2000 and a couple of mics, spending weeks trying to record one beat because it was the worst interface in the world! Then I moved on to a laptop, a couple more mics and a little Mackie desk, not knowing what I was doing but gradually making my engineering bones, so to speak. You just gradually learn. You take everything you can from the proper recording sessions you do and then use those techniques in your own studio.”

Arriving at his current studio setup, with multiple close, overhead and room mics arranged so as to provide a wide range of sonic options, has been a process of trial and error. “As any drummer recording on their own will tell you, it’s really hard to engineer and play drums at the same time,” he says. “It’s very difficult to move things around while you’re playing, so getting mics in phase is a bloody nightmare. So I’ve set up all my mics, put them in phase gradually and now it just stays as it is, pretty much. I just record everything at the same time, pick what sounds best and delete the rest.”

Close mics on the toms, over and under the snare and inside and outside the kick drum are joined by three separate overhead configurations: a pair of Coles 4038 ribbon mics above the snare and floor tom, Earthworks SR30 capacitor mics over the hi-hat and ride cymbals and an additional ribbon positioned to the side facing the floor tom, which combines with the Coles 4038 above the snare to create a ‘Glyn Johns’-style miking arrangement. More unusual is the room-miking setup, with a U47-style large-diaphragm mic suspended close to the ceiling and a pair of Josephson C42 small-diaphragm capacitor mics set very close to the side walls and pointing at them.

“That’s an example of something I saw someone doing,” Alex explains. “I was at Konk Studios with [producer/engineer] Ben Mason. We were in the main room, which is reasonably big, but he pointed these mics away from the kit at the walls. I asked him about it and then tried it in my own studio. The way that sound waves will get to a mic directly on, especially a small-diaphragm condenser, is quite frequently pretty horrible for a room mic. Pointing them away at the walls kind of deadens that nasty high-frequency cymbal effect you can end up with. If you get things wrong on the way in, you just end up trying to EQ it all day. So these kinds of little things really help.”

Timing Is Everything

The three tracks that Alex worked on for the purposes of this feature demonstrate the quality of the results that can be achieved using the remote recording approach — with a really good drummer who knows his way around a studio, at least. But they also reveal some of its limitations.

Producers Mike Chapman and Simon Pilton had always planned to use a session drummer on their song, and as a result had created the track using only a basic programmed loop that left space for further embellishment. By contrast, Dave Lockwood’s track was completely finished before we asked Alex to replace the drum part, leaving next to no wriggle room. Tim Goalen had likewise put a lot of work into creating a detailed programmed part before Alex was called in, and it’s perhaps no surprise that, while all three sets of producers felt that the sound of their drum parts had been improved, only Chapman and Pilton noticed.

Sound On Sound