Awesome! I'm in the same pursuit lately. The 90s sounds are harder for me to recreate being that most of the sound comes from the room mics. I always have better luck with the close-mic'd Roth era tracks because of the amount of processing you can do without messing up the other drums... I'm surprised how close you got with a steel snare! I use a 6.5x14 gretsch rosewood for this era
Sorry didn't see your comment till now. Happy you liked it! I'd love to get a big 14x8" one day. I really need to do more experiments when it comes to the 90s tones. I agree the Roth and mid 80s sounds are easier to get. If you listen to the isolated individual multi tracks, you can hear that 100% of the snare tone comes from the top mic. the overheads are hi passed at like 10k so it is just cymbals. 5150 studios up until 'For Unlawful' was super small so they would not have used room mics even if they wanted to. I think that's just what Donn Landee liked doing. But go figure, OU812 was the last album they did with him and everything after OU812 sounds remarkably different. Here's an example of the overhead thing I'm talking about. th-cam.com/video/HWYAT9gAsKA/w-d-xo.html
Also, the mics that made this biggest impact where the overheads. The room mics didn't add too much. Of course my living room isn't the same as what they used at 5150 but allowing the overheads to get room reflections helps a lot!. I also want to try using less gaffer tape as I found my tone to be a lot less 'resonant' and pretty dead. Mind you a 8x14" could help to haha. Before I changed my head, I had a really beat up Emperor X and I just put a strip of gaffer tape on it about 7" inches long or so and it sounded really nice! It allowed to drum to be tightened up and sound like Humans Being or the 2000s era tones but killed the overtones enough. Honestly was more impressed with that but I was exited to try this Ludwig head.
@@kevinsheppard2312 yep, i have all of the Guitar Hero isolated tracks, which unfortunately are SLIGHTLY different than the official releases as they were mixed from scratch from the Guitar Hero people… but still pretty close. I use them to mix my AVH drum sounds.
@@kevinsheppard2312 the emperor X nails the post-2000 avh sound right out of the box. it’s very similar to a black-dot head with a layer of tape (in thickness at least), it’s just missing the muffling qualities of the taped head
Unfortunately I'm away from my stuff for a while so I can't hop into my DAW but I can just expand a bit here it really isn't complicated. I genuinely have no idea how it's tuned but I demo the individual heads in the video. I'd just call it medium. And the resonant head isn't tight. 85% of the character of his later sounds comes from his overhead mics and room mics. The quality of your room is also a big determiner of that sound (but the tone is fundamentally already there from the snare). The Higher your overheads are, the better for this sound. There is not much EQ. The 'magic' frequency for his snare is around 500Hz depending on the tuning (it's like the second harmonic but that doesn't really matter right now). This gives that hollow log quality. On the ambient mics I would have tastefully added a couple dBs but not much as the cymbals will sound goofy. The Top mic sounds pretty trash because of all the muffling. Either way I added a pretty big shelf above 5kHz to add crack to the sound and will also and some 500Hz and 200Hz for body. Parallel Compression is also a super important part. I'll run a separate channel where I Have an 1176 (what they had in 5150) really crushing the sound of the overheads and room mics separately and then mix that to taste with a dry fader. Ross Hogarth who mixed A Different Kind Of Truth Talked in an SOS interview in how much that was a part of the sound. After all this you can parallel compress your entire drum bus. If you listen to the multi tracks from the early days all the way up to 1984 (nothing publicly available afterwards), you can hear that they hi-passed the overheads and thats there weren't any room mics. I think this was something Don Landee liked doing but go figure when they changed producer/engineer for For Unlawful, we get a different sound. So the snare was 100% top mic. Also 5150 studio was very small up until For Unlawful sessions where they built a big drum room. As much as I hate it when people say this when I'm looking for a trick to solve my problems, in this case, the sound is truly in the drum, all this studio stuff is just to convey it on to tape as you hear it in your ears. Take Care, and I'm happy to answer anything else!
That's a very nice sounding snare. Great mix and tuning!
@@sagarhirani4559 thanks!
Awesome! I'm in the same pursuit lately. The 90s sounds are harder for me to recreate being that most of the sound comes from the room mics. I always have better luck with the close-mic'd Roth era tracks because of the amount of processing you can do without messing up the other drums...
I'm surprised how close you got with a steel snare! I use a 6.5x14 gretsch rosewood for this era
Sorry didn't see your comment till now.
Happy you liked it! I'd love to get a big 14x8" one day. I really need to do more experiments when it comes to the 90s tones.
I agree the Roth and mid 80s sounds are easier to get. If you listen to the isolated individual multi tracks, you can hear that 100% of the snare tone comes from the top mic. the overheads are hi passed at like 10k so it is just cymbals. 5150 studios up until 'For Unlawful' was super small so they would not have used room mics even if they wanted to. I think that's just what Donn Landee liked doing. But go figure, OU812 was the last album they did with him and everything after OU812 sounds remarkably different.
Here's an example of the overhead thing I'm talking about. th-cam.com/video/HWYAT9gAsKA/w-d-xo.html
Also, the mics that made this biggest impact where the overheads. The room mics didn't add too much. Of course my living room isn't the same as what they used at 5150 but allowing the overheads to get room reflections helps a lot!. I also want to try using less gaffer tape as I found my tone to be a lot less 'resonant' and pretty dead. Mind you a 8x14" could help to haha.
Before I changed my head, I had a really beat up Emperor X and I just put a strip of gaffer tape on it about 7" inches long or so and it sounded really nice! It allowed to drum to be tightened up and sound like Humans Being or the 2000s era tones but killed the overtones enough. Honestly was more impressed with that but I was exited to try this Ludwig head.
@@kevinsheppard2312 yep, i have all of the Guitar Hero isolated tracks, which unfortunately are SLIGHTLY different than the official releases as they were mixed from scratch from the Guitar Hero people… but still pretty close. I use them to mix my AVH drum sounds.
@@kevinsheppard2312 the emperor X nails the post-2000 avh sound right out of the box. it’s very similar to a black-dot head with a layer of tape (in thickness at least), it’s just missing the muffling qualities of the taped head
@@tanneryordan 100%
I need a how to video!!!
Unfortunately I'm away from my stuff for a while so I can't hop into my DAW but I can just expand a bit here it really isn't complicated.
I genuinely have no idea how it's tuned but I demo the individual heads in the video. I'd just call it medium. And the resonant head isn't tight.
85% of the character of his later sounds comes from his overhead mics and room mics. The quality of your room is also a big determiner of that sound (but the tone is fundamentally already there from the snare). The Higher your overheads are, the better for this sound.
There is not much EQ. The 'magic' frequency for his snare is around 500Hz depending on the tuning (it's like the second harmonic but that doesn't really matter right now). This gives that hollow log quality. On the ambient mics I would have tastefully added a couple dBs but not much as the cymbals will sound goofy. The Top mic sounds pretty trash because of all the muffling. Either way I added a pretty big shelf above 5kHz to add crack to the sound and will also and some 500Hz and 200Hz for body.
Parallel Compression is also a super important part. I'll run a separate channel where I Have an 1176 (what they had in 5150) really crushing the sound of the overheads and room mics separately and then mix that to taste with a dry fader. Ross Hogarth who mixed A Different Kind Of Truth Talked in an SOS interview in how much that was a part of the sound. After all this you can parallel compress your entire drum bus.
If you listen to the multi tracks from the early days all the way up to 1984 (nothing publicly available afterwards), you can hear that they hi-passed the overheads and thats there weren't any room mics. I think this was something Don Landee liked doing but go figure when they changed producer/engineer for For Unlawful, we get a different sound. So the snare was 100% top mic. Also 5150 studio was very small up until For Unlawful sessions where they built a big drum room.
As much as I hate it when people say this when I'm looking for a trick to solve my problems, in this case, the sound is truly in the drum, all this studio stuff is just to convey it on to tape as you hear it in your ears.
Take Care, and I'm happy to answer anything else!
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