Updating my drum sound adding distortion, tape sim and reverb to drums lots of info in description
4Hey folks, I'm still working on the drum sound here, the endless journey for the perfect drum sound never ends!
Here's what's going on in this video. First off, this is admittedly some pretty sloppy playing but I was tired after setting up all of the lights and other stuff. I'll try to play better next time.
I updated the camera angle and lighting and video stuff a bunch.
-moved the camera (canon rp)
-still using 24mm f4 auto iso 3200k
-the 4 star filter of course
-moved the key light(neewer nl480) 3200k
-setup a rim light(a cheap amazon one) 3200k
-there's a little bit of daylight spilling into the room which gets shifted to a blue tint for fill because of the white balance shift on the camera to 3200k, this creates a bi-color lighting effect popular in cinema and film
-in editing(davinci) I color corrected the files which I haven't done in a looooooooooong time. Normally i'm too lazy.
-to color correct i added 4 nodes. the first one corrects contrast. i use the parade meter for this. I lowered the pivot point all the way to zero and then increased the contrast to correct the heavy dramatic shadows from the lighting style. i wanted to retain the feel of the shadows so my goal when increasing the contrast was to put my skin tones just above the midway point.
-then in the same node i balance the lows and highs too
-in the second node i correct the white balance, i like to use the vector meter for this. the way i like to use the meter is i picture myself looking down at the meter from a top down view. when i rotate the white balance and tint controls, it changes the info on the vector graph on a "z" plane that is pointed towards the viewer from a top down viewer. the goal of adjusting the controls is to objectively center the balance of the color data. You'll find that one of the benefits of this technique is it almost always perfectly corrects skin tones for all cameras and filming techniques, seriously, give it a try :) super easy and fast too.
-in the 3rd node i like to intentional shift the color fo the shoadows and highlights. this is too create a more moody feel from the color to increase drama.
-this is acheived by increasing the blue color info in the shadows, and the orange in the highlights. here's how i do it without blowing out the highlights or screwing up the shadows by losing them or reducing contrast too much.
-in the shadows control, increase the blue by .2, and the red by .1 and then do the opposite for the highlights controls. decrease the blue by .2 and the red by .1.
-this is a simple way to do the teal and orange cinema look. The real reason this technique works so well is in harmony with the white balance shift to 3200k we did on the camera with key lights set to 3200k and daylight(5600k) filling in the shadows which is more like 7-8000k after the shift.
-the final and 4th node is to increase the saturation by 65%
-i do this because after all of the normalizing correction techniques I apply earlier in the signal chain, it needs a little razzle dazzle to make it look fun again. the sat control to me is like the icing on the cake. not too much, but the right amount can go a long way and is necessary. it's needed to balance out the corrections from earlier. I love the whole ying yang thing going here between the objective correction approach and more subjective saturation approach.
-why 65%?
-superstition and math ratios haha thats how i mix mostly
-i like the 80/20 rule and use it everywhere when mixing and editing and coloring.
-however sometimes i feel like it's too much to go with 80 and 20 isn't enough so in those cases i go with thirds. 65% is like 2/3's of the way and according to meatloaf, 2 out of 3 ain't bad and that's good enough for me!
-seriously, it's way more fun to edit and mix like this!
-don't judge me please lol
okay now for the sound
-i wanted to emulate some lofi drum sounds with digital plugins
so the drums are record with 4 mics
-a kick(M3), snare(57) and spaced pair OH's(C2's)
-the mics are plugged directly into my scarlett interface
-then in reason on each channel i use the scream distortion plugin to emulate mixer channel distortion, the retro thing for tape saturation, and board eq
-the OH's are spaced at 42 because of douglas adams
-the channels are fed to a submix drumbus channel
-the drum bus is parellel compressed at 80/20 with as much comp as I can add without hearing it, then i add a bit more lol! i love compression
-then i fire that through my dbx "secret weapon" outboard rack unit
-then a tiny smidge of digital limiting davinci during the edit for safety reasons.
and that's what you hear!
I'd rather type it out than talk it haha, if you'd like me to make a video about any of that stuff let me know in the comments.
thanks for reading and listening, peace and love all. xoxoxo
#drums #drumsounds #homestudio #davinciresolve #colorcorrection #propellerheadreason #recording