Okeydokey, this is my first article for the new and improved Pro Tools

Forum site so bare with my terrible riting skillz. Hello, I'm Bagua,

I've been engineering for unsigned bands and small labels in the UK for

some time and have written and produced bits and bobs of music for tv

and film, I'm not a multi-platinum award winning record producer but I'm

fairly experienced in recording drums. Hundreds of times actually. I'm

also a drummer and have been recorded by a few different pro engineers

and I stole all their tricks. Mwah ha ha haaa!

So, you are after a killer drum sound eh? Okeydokey then, this is the

way I do it. Lets assume that since this is a Pro Tools forum you are a

relatively new PT LE user with 8 inputs and a handful of mics.

First off, and this is stupidly obvious really, you will need a good

drummer and a good drum kit. An experienced drummer and a well tuned kit

and crisp cymbals are where 70% of your drum sound is going to come

from, second to that is where you put the mics, what mics you use and what

processing (eq. compression, reverb etc) you are going to use. If you

just have a bunch of vocal mics, don't worry, you can actually get a

half decent drum sound with them, just not as good as specialist drum

mics.