Drum tracking is so much fun and more than any other area of band recording encourages experimentation. Sometimes trying something new works, sometimes it ends up being a dead end but in the spirit of “nothing ventured, nothing gained” it’s still worth trying things. There are no bad ideas, just bad decisions…

In this extended premium video tutorial, Pro Tools Expert team member Julian Rodgers revisits a drum tracking session from some time ago in which he used a small room just off the tracking room as somewhere to put an extra mic for ambience. It was a carpeted room with a suspended ceiling and as a result was very dry but it only took a minute to put a PZM on the floor and create an extra track so why not?

On returning to the session Julian decided to see whether he could make something useful out of this dry, distant mic. Watch the video to see how he got on with this and some other tricks he used to control his drum sound.

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Photo by Jayden Buckley