The Children’s Toy Trick For a Cheap But Killer Drum Recording

Here’s a drum recording trick I never thought about until Thursday.

Toms can resonate pretty heavily even if they’re tuned well.

So much that it can interfere with other drums and cause muddiness in the overall sound. You want those drums to sound powerful and heavy but it’s terrible if your 16″ floor tom is resonating into the overheads.

It’ll just be messy and muddy.

Moon Gels Are One Solution

The conventional way to fix this problem is to use moon gels.

In case you didn’t know, moon gels are small gels that you put on the toms to kill the sustain. They still sound great when you hit them but they don’t bleed muddiness into the other mics.

So cue me and the band scrambling around the various music stores in downtown Guadalajara looking for anybody who sold moon gels without any luck.

Literally none of the music stores sold them so we had to come up with something else.

Let’s Go to the Toy Store

So we got this great idea:

We can just use those funny little miniature sticky hands instead!

They’re a little thinner but they work just as well. And the best part is, they’re waaaaaaay cheaper than the overpriced moon gels. Check them out in the picture above.

So next time you’re having drum sustain problems just take a ride to the toy store and get some sticky hands to make those drums sound punchy.

What You Can Learn From My Sessions

Although I don’t have this trick in the Recording & Mixing Strategies package I have been documenting this whole process and what we’ve learned from recording a 9 song album over the weekend to create into a kick-ass studio recording report.

Here’s what I’ll include:

• The pre-production process and how it changed completely during the session.
• Gain-staging the drums and compressing on the way in(I don’t even think I need to compress the drums in the mix they sound so good).
• Recording flute, trumpet and saxophone in less than optimal conditions.
• The mini-movements of your microphone and how it affects your bass guitar sound.
• How the first drum sound was shit and what I did to fix it.

And I’m even including some of the multi-tracks so you can hear exactly how all that sounds.

The catch? I’m only giving this to Recording & Mixing Strategies(Bundle, Plus or Platinum) customers so if you want in on that content you can grab your package here:

www.audio-issues.com/strategies

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