Friday, May 17, 2019

Sticky Wicket is Becoming My Favorite YouTube Drummer

If you haven’t seen Sticky Wicket yet, you are really missing out. The YouTube Channel, Next Level Chops Has been featuring a series of videos with drummer, Sticky Wicket, who has an amazing collection of real vintage drums, and is a master drum historian.

Their Sticky Wicket Playlist has many great videos of Sticky giving drum history lessons, showing his old timey drums, as well as amazing demonstrations such as the one above. They are a true joy to watch and I highly recommend them!

Friday, May 10, 2019

Aquarian's Answer To The Classic Black Dot Drum Head (Classic Clear Power Dot)

So many great drummers swore by Remo’s C.S (Black Dot) drum heads over the years such as Tony Williams, Alex Van Halen, Steve Smith, and many more. But these days Remo’s quality sadly just isn’t what it used to be, thankfully Aquarian makes an alternative that is the same concept, but in a far more durable and consistent head.

I recently replaced my tom heads with these and made a video about it. Check it out below.

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Recording Multi-Channel Drums With Limited Inputs

 

from one of my vids

Recording drums is an art-form, and there’s many ways to do it. In today’s era of cheap home recording equipment it’s easier than ever to record yourself. One problem though when it comes to drums is many commercially available and affordable computer interfaces have a limited amount of audio inputs. Most commonly 2 or 4.

When this is the case you have some decisions to make. You can either use less mics, by going for a more distant miking technique, or you can use a mixer to combine signals into less inputs. With this tutorial I chose the ladder. I wanted a more closely miked sound on my interface that only has 4 inputs. I used a small inexpensive mixer from Amazon, and my Behringer UMC404HD and combined some channels to use all 4 channels with the maximum amount of options to use later on in the mix.

In the video below I show you how I recorded kick, snare, overhead, two acoustic toms and two electric toms using only 4 channels, and still having the ability to adjust quite a bit of levels in the mix.

Updated drum lesson playlist

It's hard for me to update this website constantly with all of the new drum lessons I am making, so I figured I would make a playlist wh...