Recording Drums 8 - Valve / Tube Preamps for Colour!

www.shrunkenheadsstudios.com

Recording Drums, Percussion - & Dealing with People Who Like to Hit Things 8.  

Here at The Coolest Recording Studio in London Town - we like our different mic preamps - & we got a bunch of types & flavours. 

Drums! 

Generally speaking - you want a nice Fast Solid State mic preamp to capture the whip & crack of a drum - & to keep the metalwork (cymbals etc) bright, crisp, shiny & clean. 
Also - you'll be recording the space around the drum - the ambience of the room - so you'll mainly be after some sharp, quick preamp to pick up the nuances of the player. 

So why use a valve / tube preamp? 

kingkrule king krule ghostpoet micachu
rft neumann gefell mic pre 


Yep - tube preamps are Much slower to track audio waves than solid state pre's - but boy do they add personality, warmth & a depth that only tubes can. There's a "thickness" to tube preamps - a kind of golden solidity - so while you may not want them as a stereo pair for your overheads - used in mono in the mix they can really add some sublime weight to your recordings.
The preamp above is made by RFT in the 30's who became Neumann Gefell. They are transformerless so are much clearer than most other transformer fronted tube preamps - beautiful on drums, acoustic instruments & vocals. 
Here at ShStudios we have two pairs - each pair has a different set of tubes. Best jazz pre going. 

The Behemoth!

best south london recording studio classic vintage

The Behemoth is a 4 channel microphone mixer / preamp with huge transformers at the inputs - you can get amazing saturation from drums with this bad ass!

Vortexions!

https://www.facebook.com/pg/analogueaddicts/photos/?tab=album&album_id=683730744970350
vortexion 
 Vortexion preamps - as used by Joe Meek, The Who - & any good sound engineer worth their salt. They cut the mustard like nothing else - great on drum overheads, guitar & acoustic instruments. 

Ampex Tube Preamps 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampex
ampex 601
Superb tube preamps - we use these just about every session - mainly with condenser microphones - they take off any harsh top end & make anything from vocals to zither sound rich & lovely.

So - to recap - tube preamps are great for adding richness, a bit of natural overdrive & mojo to a drum recording. 

Next time - overdriving mixing desks for juiced up drums!

www.shrunkenheadsstudios.com
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rudimentary Electric Bass Recording - Puttin' the Big into Booty!

Image
Here at the Coolest Recording Studio in London Town - we do like a big fat bootifull low end - as much as we like melodic mids & tingling highs - & while there are a gazillion mixing / production tricks to make the bass sit nice, pop out or groove summore - you always gotta start out with the basics - & get the badass tracked. First thing's first - get your bass player settled - doesn't matter if they're sitting or standing - they're gonna want to see the drummer - or at least the control room. Plug the bass into a DI ( Direct Injection ) box before any pedals or fx units they may be using - you want a good clean signal going to your recorder - you can use this as is to mix in with the mic'd up amp - you may want to process it with effects or software amp emulations - or indeed you may want to run it into a different amplifier and re record a different tone later down the line. Here's a pretty good quality di: You just plug into t...
Read more

Mic Pre's - Putting Flavour In The Mix!

Image
Here at The Coolest Recording Space in London Town - we got all kinds of studio shazzle - mixers / compressors / eq's - but for audio capture, the most important thing aside for the mics - are mic preamplifiers. They come in all shapes & forms - from lovely vintage tube pre's that warm up the sound of an instrument or space to super fast solid state units that capture transient material (like metal drums or fast picked acoustic guitar) to transformer based pre's that you can distort at the input to add bloom & energy to an audio source. This is a Vortexion tube preamp as used by Joe Meek & the Who back in the 50's & 60's - beautiful for recording drums, guitars, vocals & ambient spaces with ribbon microphones. They were broadcast quality units that add a rich, fullness to the mic chain. You can also use them to pleasantly saturate vocals etc in post production. vortexion   These Ampex 602 units came out of an old tape recorder...
Read more

Microphone Making - The 3 Capsule Mid Side Recording Studio Mic

Image
south london recording studio London Recording Studio Life !!   Here at The Coolest recording Studio in South London - we got the creation craving! We just Have to make new, interesting & exciting recording & mixing devices for our excellent clients . Our most recent research has led us to develop a set of microphones (Coppermics - made out of copper!) the formats of which do not appear to be readily available on the market. You can of course get mics spec built - but boy does this cost a ton of moolah & takes ages - so .... we put our heads together & came up with This beauty - the Coppermic King ! Microphone - The King - for vocals - guitar - drums Coppermic The King All three capsules are identical in tone & volume - the centre mic picks up the centre image of the audio you're recording, and the left & right capsules pick up the stereo information. You should always eq the centre mic with a slight (1-3 db) boost at the fundament...
Read more