Studio Drum Kit (Multi Mic)

It was February 2020, my band Brave The Day had just reshuffled its members and we were excited to start writing some new music… then Covid happened. We couldn’t meet up to rehearse, but we could still write. Over the following months we put together a short album, with plans to record it as soon as we were able.

Finally, in October 2020, we were able to arrange to record at Maple Rehearsal Studios in Southend, Essex as our friend had a digital desk and remote recording set up. Of course, the day we had booked turned out to be the day we were due to go back into lockdown. We’d already set everything up the night before, so seeing as we had to go back to collect our gear anyway, we figured we might as well still record.

Knowing we only had that short day to track the drums, I got our drummer to record a series of individual hits at different dynamics across the whole kit. The intention was simply to have some clean hits available to replace the occasional dud hit rather than having to splice together different takes.

Five years later, while doing some housekeeping on old hard drives, I stumbled across this session again and realised those samples could become a drum library of their own.

Studio Drum Kit preserves the different mic positions from that original recording session and gives you the opportunity to mix a real world, budget recorded drum kit yourself. We also had microphones inside metal trash cans which sounded… well, trashy. It was an interesting experiment, but I’ve spared you those!

These recordings were never intended to become a sampled instrument, and this isn’t a deeply sampled kit with endless round robins and velocity layers. But with a bit of scripting and trickery, it actually works surprisingly well.

Hope you enjoy!

Also if you want to hear these recordings check out Brave The Day – Following The Light Of The Sun