BLOG

Tracking drums for Dub FX

Jul 12 2010

Recently I've been tracking drums for a new Dub FX album. It's been about 4 or 5 years since the last release, and the boys are itching for a new CD to bless the fans with. So far, the drums have come out fantastic sounding. We spent over a month tracking them, adjusting mics distances/locations, Tuning & EQ'ing out rings and undesirable overtones just to get this right and it payed off. The first round of drums tracked were recorded at another local studio and they just weren't tracked properly for reggae. So they had to be redone at my studio.

Most people aren't aware, but Reggae drums are a different breed them most drum sounds are in other genres of music. The desirable sound is, dry and dead sounding drums with short decays.  You don't want the drums to be ringing out like John Bonham or something. Also, we don't like "Room" sound in reggae drums, unless your going for some old school 60's ska'ish approach/vibe, which is not the case in this particular recording. Everything needs to be extremely tight, with short decays on all the drums, and most importantly, we want it to be very crisp and clean sounding. Extreme highs and lows. And the mids are essentially scooped out. Love or hate it. That's the sound. Drums and Bass are the most prominent element in Reggae music and they are meant to be the "Stars" of the show. So they are treated as such. A lot of rock oriented type engineers don't quite understand that and they end up trying to do all these fancy drum techniques and it rarely ends up sounding right.  Less is more with Reggae. I promise.

We'll be tracking horns and vocals in August. I'll check back in as the project progresses.

Leave a comment

  • Required fields are marked with *.

If you have trouble reading the code, click on the code itself to generate a new random code.