Q. Do you offer volume discounts?
A. No volume discounts are available since this is a highly custom work.
Q. Do you use drum machines or sampling to produce results?
A. No, we do not use electronic triggering techniques. We produce acoustical recordings using professional drums, cymbals, microphones and recording equipment in our acoustically-designed studio room.
Q. What kind of recording chain gear are you using?
A. We would like to keep recording gear specs to ourselves, because specs may change with time, settings may vary, etc. - we do not want to look like we are breaking promises if something changes.
What is more important is how do you like the demo sound - we try to keep the produced drum track quality very consistent; we even constantly use inch meter to align mics to each other, and we use a drum tuner.
Q. I am on the upload page, I select the track to upload, hit SEND, and nothing happens, never uploads, I can see nothing is being sent.
A. Unfortunately, we are not able to help you with uploading. There is little we can do about it since this aspect is out of our control (it is controlled by the web-browser and ISP infrastructure you are using). It may be a problem on your side since our other clients have uploaded their files without problems. You may also try using another web-browser application to upload the files. Please make sure the size of your file does not exceed the size limit (10 MB per file).
Q. I have not developed any rhythm files for the song. I thought that I would leave that to you.
A. We still need some rhythm track from you, because if we try to use our own metronome for your song the timing may be inaccurate. Please upload at least a click track (you may submit the click track in the place of the drum track as well). Do not forget to include initial count-in ticking which is required for the drummer to start playing at the correct moment.
Q. I would like to provide some more detailed information about song's structure. How I can do this?
A. You may provide such information in the "Additional drummer instructions" part, in a similar way:
1 bar count-in
1 bar drum fill
4 bars intro
8 bars verse
6 bars bridge
16 bars chorus
8 bars verse
6 bars bridge
16 bars chorus
8 bars drum and bass break - the drums can be busier here, almost a drum solo
16 bars guitar solo - start simple and build energy to the end
16 bars quiet sparser melodic section, build slightly towards the end
16 bars chorus
Q. Why you did not include hi-hat track in the final archive to download?
A. The way we record, we do not have a separate hi-hat track. Overhead microphones capture the hi-hat for the most part. Beside that the snare drum track and side microphones capture a bit of a hi-hat sound - you may use an equalizer on these tracks to adjust the loudness of the hi-hat.
Q. I would like to have a separate drum track preview for evaluation, not being mixed with my song.
A. Drum and song mix preview is provided for your evaluation of the playing quality, and overall drum playing style. It is not meant for anything else, there is little sense to ask for the drums-only preview with the desire to perform some processing or solo listening: as far as drum timbre and sound is concerned, we can't change it anyway (sound examples are available on the drum service information page). We provide full 24-bit 96 kHz set of recorded files after your approval of the preview. You can then do any kind of processing you wish, and you may also change the hi-hat (and cymbal) loudness balance by boosting volume in the bass drum and snare drum tracks. Note that we will not re-do track recording after your approval of the preview.
Q. It seems that tracks you have provided have a low volume, peaking at -16 dBFS. I expect it to peak at -10 or -8 dBFS. I'm worrying about lower signal-to-noise ratio and have some difficulties boosting the drum tracks volume.
A. We have optimized the recording headroom for most playing styles, so drum levels are standard, we can't adjust them for each song we record, because this is a very time-consuming process (mic gain knobs are analog and there are 11 of them to adjust, 6 of them in pairs). Simply use some gain staging plug-in that allows you to boost tracks by 8-10 dB. Generally, recording at a bit lower levels is much better than occasional clipping and saturation. Moreover, additional 6 dB of signal-to-noise ratio may not make much sense in the mix - resulting noise floor is pretty low even if you boost the track by 15 dB (our studio is technically quiet).
Q. Could you please tell me the "idea" standing behind the microphone arrangement you use?
A. The main idea is to capture the drum set in "3D".
Overhead mics are used to capture cymbals and the drumhead front of the drums. You can use a wide high-shelf filter boost tuned to 5kHz to make cymbals louder. A wide 2 dB peak cut tuned to 1 kHz can be used to remove some mid-range sonic content that prevails in the overhead mics.
Side mics are used to capture sides of the bass drum, toms and snare drum. These mics capture the punch of the bass drum and "crack" of the snare drum. Side mics are not aimed at capturing cymbals. Applying some wide low-shelf boost below 200 Hz can be used to increase the punch of the bass drum without increasing loudness of the snare drum crack.
Room mics are used to capture overall "presence" sound of the drum kit. Cymbals are prevailing in these mics. A compression is usually used on the room mics to increase "reality" of the overall sound. High-shelf boost/cut can be further used to increase/decrease the loudness of cymbals.
Note that if you desire to keep the loudness of the snare drum in the mix minimal you may bypass the separate snare drum track, and simultaneously boost highs in both the overhead and room mics while boosting lows in the side mics. You may also use a non-wide peaking filter cut at around 200 Hz - this affects the loudness of the snare drum greatly and reduces its boominess.
Q. What if I wanted to edit the tracks you have produced and add a couple of crash cymbal hits here and there?
A. Exactly for this purpose we have produced a set of raw cymbal and hi-hat samples. It can be downloaded here:
VoxengoDrumServiceCymbals.rar
