Chamberlin Secrets of Recording Drums

Recording drums is a bitch. For one thing, you need a good sounding room to record in. Unfortunately, few of us have 24/7 access to the stone stairwell at Headley Grange. You also need a bunch of expensive microphones, professional-quality preamps and esoteric compressors, limiters, EQs and whatnot to capture the sound of the drums and the room in pristine quality. You'll probably also need an engineer with the know-how to set up and operate all tat equipment. Last, but certainly not least, you will need an excellent drummer with an awesome drum kit that's tuned to perfection.

Most musicians with home studios have given up trying to record live drums and instead either have the drummer trigger samples with electronics pads or use sampled drum loop libraries. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Triggered samples make it easy to capture pro-quality drum sounds, but they often sound canned and lack the expressiveness of playing an acoustic kit. Sample libraries can sound great as well, but using loops that are mixed down to left and right stereo tracks doesn't give you much flexibility for processing individual instruments like the snare, kick, and overheads to make the drums fit in well with the overall recording.

Recently, companies like Discrete Drums and Submersible Music have started offering drum libraries that consist of multi-track recordings of well known drummers playing in some of the world's finest studios. M-Audio's ProSessions 24 Jimmy Chamberlin Signature Drums Vol. 1 takes this approach as well, providing a complete drum session with the former Smashing Pumpkins and Zwan drummer on a single DVD.