![recording drums in t-racks recording drums in t-racks](https://musicianonamission.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/DrumsStudio.jpg)
Once again, extra compression and/or reverb might then be needed to draw out a satisfying sound.īy contrast, if you leave time‑alignment out of your drum mixing process, you won't usually get the same transient smack that time‑alignment can provide, but the close mics may sound clearer and more up-front as a result of the time gap between their transients and the corresponding peaks in the overheads and room mics. If you fade the room and overhead mics down to reduce this effect, the drum sound, as a whole, can then begin to sound rather anaemic and disconnected because of its reliance on the, typically, less natural‑sounding close mics. The other problem is that time‑aligning the close‑miked drums can cause the overheads and room mics to pull those drums backwards into the mix. However, the danger is that the weight and body of your drum hits may then appear lacking by comparison, and you can find that this leaves more dynamics‑processing work to do at the mix. If you time-align, what you get is a more phase‑coherent attack to your most important drum sounds, and this can make it easier for them to cut through other elements of the mix. The reason for the lack of common practice is that a time‑aligned kit sound has different characteristics to one that has not been time‑aligned, so both tend to serve different goals. By the same token, however, every engineer seems to have their own preferences in this regard, and I can understand that an artist might never have encountered such practices if he happened to have worked with engineers who didn't bother with time‑alignment, or else dealt with it only surreptitiously under cover of an unattended mixdown!
![recording drums in t-racks recording drums in t-racks](https://sundownsessionsstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Players_Drums.jpg)
SOS contributor Mike Senior replies: In a word, no. So am I really alone in doing this kind of time alignment? With due deference, I returned the track timings to their original positions and reset the phase settings (though I left the snare phase flips), but to my ears it now sounds awful the phase cancellations are killing the mix. However, I was recently working with a very experienced recording artist who recoiled in horror at what I was doing, declaring that he knew no engineer but me who did this. Here you can see a small selection: Voxengo TransGainer, Stillwell Audio Transient Monster and SPL Transient Designer. Fortunately, there are now numerous dedicated transient processors on the market that can help.
![recording drums in t-racks recording drums in t-racks](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/2nMoaps9aRYCecaUTaspkZ-320-80.jpg)
If you prefer not to time‑align the tracks in a multi‑mic drum recording, achieving adequate transient attack can sometimes be a problem. I finally flip the phase buttons so I get positive attacks on all the tracks (meaning I usually have to flip everything apart from the in/out kick mics and bottom snare mic). As a matter of course, I align the overheads to the close top snare mic, then I align all the mics to the overheads. After recording my drum tracks, I spend some time aligning all the waveforms.