Today I did something that I’m not used to and haven’t done in a while. For my production private lessons at Humber, my professor Tom encouraged me to experiment emulating the drum sound of one of my favourite recordings.

I decided to record a cover of “I Don’t Trust Myself with Loving You”. Tom suggested a few ideas on how to approach this. I previously played for him a recording of a drum cover I made, and he said he thought the kick and snare were solid, but that there may be some comb filtering happening in the overhead mics.

Comb filtering is where you have phasing issues in your microphones due to the reflections of the room and the placement of your mics from the ceiling. To avoid this, he suggested recording cymbals separately since I have an e-kit.

Keeping that in mind, I started by recording the kick and snare pattern only. This was a challenge for me because I am used to recording the full groove on an acoustic kit. After this, I played the hi-hat and cymbal patterns on my e-kit as Tom suggested. 

The finished result was a pretty well balanced version of the drum groove! The next step I need to take is adding a deep snare sample as well as a kick sound that has a bit more decay to it than what I recorded. The kick I recorded had a strong attack but very little release.

I am looking forward to continuing to make more of these covers with a goal of recreating the awesome drum sounds that were originally captured!