Chamberlin Secrets of Recording Drums

Recording drums is a bitch. For one thing, you need a good sounding room to record in. Unfortunately, few of us have 24/7 access to the stone stairwell at Headley Grange. You also need a bunch of expensive microphones, professional-quality preamps and esoteric compressors, limiters, EQs and whatnot to capture the sound of the drums and the room in pristine quality. You'll probably also need an engineer with the know-how to set up and operate all tat equipment. Last, but certainly not least, you will need an excellent drummer with an awesome drum kit that's tuned to perfection.

Most musicians with home studios have given up trying to record live drums and instead either have the drummer trigger samples with electronics pads or use sampled drum loop libraries. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Triggered samples make it easy to capture pro-quality drum sounds, but they often sound canned and lack the expressiveness of playing an acoustic kit. Sample libraries can sound great as well, but using loops that are mixed down to left and right stereo tracks doesn't give you much flexibility for processing individual instruments like the snare, kick, and overheads to make the drums fit in well with the overall recording.

Recently, companies like Discrete Drums and Submersible Music have started offering drum libraries that consist of multi-track recordings of well known drummers playing in some of the world's finest studios. M-Audio's ProSessions 24 Jimmy Chamberlin Signature Drums Vol. 1 takes this approach as well, providing a complete drum session with the former Smashing Pumpkins and Zwan drummer on a single DVD.

This disc, the first of a four part series, features three full-length, drum-only "songs," which are divided into separate patterns that are one to 16 bars in length and feature intros, fills, and numerous variations. Best of all, the disc provides 16 separate tracks; in- and out-of-phase kick drum, subkick, snare top and bottom, hi-hat, tom 1, tom 2/3, tom 4, tom 5, overhead left and right, room left and right, "bullet" microphone and overall mix. The initial tempos of the three songs are 119, 123, and 150 bpm, but the audio files are formatted in Acidized WAV and REX2, so you can load them into digital audio software like Acid Pro, Cubase, Live or Logic and freely adjust the tempo without changing the pitch of feel of the original drum performances.

On the accompanying video included on the disc, Chamberlin says that his drum tracks are influenced by what he played on certain Smashing Pumpkins songs. As a result, the "songs" have a very distinctive feel instead of being the usual generic beats that you'll find on most drum library collections. While there's no denying that Chamberlin's performance throughout is top notch, you may find that many of the patterns may have a little bit too much Smashing Pumpkins character and they don't work particularly well with your own ideas. This is one case where you'll really need to try before you buy. If you find the drum patterns inspire and lead you to a frenzy of riff-writing madness, this collection will be a good investment.

If you're the type of producer who loves to chop up drum beats and rearrange them to your own satisfaction, this is less of a problem. In that case, you'll truly love the outstanding sound quality of the 24-bit files and the personal character provided by Chamberlin's distinctive touch. The individual tracks provide plenty of opportunity for mangling or refining the sounds as you please, whether you want and über-compressed kick or like the touch of distortion on the snare for extra punch.

Jimmy Chamberlin Signature Drums Vol. 1 gives you a full session's worth of immaculately recorded multi track drum performances. It could easily cost you several thousand dollars to rent a similar studio and the necessary mics and processors, hire and engineer and pay a pro drummer, but M-Audio gives you all these benefits for less than it costs to feed and beer the slacker you call the drummer in your band. If you're a Pumpkins fan, you'll enjoy jamming along with these tracks and maybe even composing your own Corganesque masterpiece. Short of bribery, how else are you going to get Jimmy Chamberlin to play on your tracks for only fifty bucks?