Recording Drums: Open-Back vs Closed-Back Headphones
It took me a while to figure it out, but think I will now use open-back headphones to record drums. Quite the opposite of what common sense dictates, right?
Common Sense?
Until I finally built a proper recording studio, I have been recording drums with an electronic kit for decades. So I got used to playing with closed back headphones (you don’t want to hear the drums sticks on the electronic pads).
It seemed obvious to me to do the same with acoustic drums, and only hear the sound of the miked kit in headphones, trying to isolate my ears from the acoustic sound of the kit in the room. Especially when playing the role of the sound engineer at the same time as the drummer, it looks like a good idea to hear the recorded tone and adjust drumming accordingly.
Except that it does not work for me, at all!
Imperfect Isolation
First isolation is not perfect, regardless of the quality of the headphones. The best I could achieve is with in-ear monitors and additional ear mufflers (on the right of the picture above), and yet the acoustic sound is still going thru.
Worse, it is muffled and interacts badly with the tone of the recorded kit (phase cancelation). As a result, the snare drum sounds awful, and the cymbals seem to be much lower than in reality – pretty different from what gets recorded anyway. And that’s really uninspiring to play!
Hitting Way Too Hard
The other problem with this method is that I tend too play much louder than you would if I were playing without headphones.
In addition to being annoying for other people in the studio while recording, it also changes the sound of the drums drastically. It’s really hard to play with nuances when the volume is fully controlled in the headphones (and it is even worse if applying effects such as compression).
As a result the recording does not sound as good as expected (well, it never does, but…).
Getting There…
After trying to play with only in-ears (which only attenuates the volume), I found it much better – still hitting too hard though. So I gave open-back headphones a try, and to my surprise, it works much better for me!
Of course, you have to be cautious not to increase the volume of the playback too much to avoid damaging your ears, and play softer instead (I have a bias here as I tend to prefer soft drumming in general). If you prefer the tone of a kit played loudly, I guess you can simply use in-ears instead.
Note: I currently do not use overhead mics to record drums, so there is no chance of the headphones spilling into the recording. I would probably use semi-closed headphones instead.
It seems to be working fine with effects too (adding reverb wet signal to the headphones mix works pretty well for example). So far so good!
And you what’s your favorite method to monitor your drum-kit while recording?
