My friend Langston Masingale (designer of the Zulu analog tape simulator) brought this up on his Facebook page: Drum alignment. I thought I'd weigh in on the subject and show some of the pros and cons, as well as how I do it.
I've watch many videos about time alignment on RU-vid but I've never seen anybody mentioning when you "need" to time align certain tracks with each other and when you can safely ignore the time alignment. I think this is because most people don't have the faintest idea of the underlying basic physics and the way human hearing works. The way I see it there's only couple of simple concepts to grasp and when you understand them it demystifies the whole thing. First thing to understand is that human ear cannot distinguish two signals of the same source as two different sound sources when mixed together when the time difference is very small, about under 30 ms, but the ear (or the brain) sums them up as one sound source with altered frequency content because of the comb filter effect cause by the time difference. The second thing to be aware of is that the amount of frequency coloration depends on how close the level of the two signals are when they are summed together which brings us to the first rule of thumb "If the difference in volume is more than 10 dB you can ignore time alignment" because then the change in frequency content remains below what human hearing can distinguish. The key thing here is "when summed" so if you put a compressor, eq or some other processor before summing it can bring the two signals closer in level and within the 10 dB of each other when you need to at least consider time aligning those tracks. In fact the famous 1:3 rule in multi mic recording is the direct consequence of these two things as when the level drops 9dB when the mic distance is tripled so you don't need to worry about the distant mic picking up the faint bleed from adjacent sound source. In my (not so) humble opinion much of the mystic of drum mixing comes from the days of analog recording when you didn't have the luxury of time aligning tracks so you had to come up with clever workarounds to prevent the problems caused by summing up tracks with different time offsets from becoming too audible. With today's DAWs it's very easy to shift tracks with sample accuracy so why not take advance of this great tool that the sound engineers of last millennium didn't have at their disposal.
Great video Matthew. I have been aligning my tracks purely by looking at the waveform. I was a little daunted by InPhase previously but will go back to it. Thanks
I do something similar Gary. I tend to align by hand, check by ear (in mono with equal volumes, and listening for maximum cancellation) and then check using AutoAlign. It might seem daft not to just stick on AutoAlign ... but I think it gives me greater control and also ... if I do timing edits, all the transients are in the same place ... and so timing edits (and comping) don't mess with the alignment.
Look at it this way, almost everyone adds a stereo drum room mic in the drum mix. That is essentially adding unaligned drum sound to the mix so that it doesn't sound too cold and one dimensional. Unaligned close mic tracks are a different breed of the same thing, so that too adds another layer of depth. You can always get plenty of punch from eq and compression techniques but you can't get that natural sounding depth with artificial means if all your tracks are perfectly aligned. When micing a drum kit, use isolation headphones to monitor in real time and spend plenty of time moving mics around to find the sweet spot of position and distance.
Totally agree with this video. I tried this experiment with two different records of the same band. My final conclusion was that the depth of unaligned tracks was more benificial to the overall sound of the drums than time aligned tracks. The only, time-aligning I recommend is with the top and bottom snare mics. The unaligned tracks have richer, more interesting acoustics going on. Besides, when everything is mixed and mastered, they both end up having the same punch.
Exactly. Adding the InPhase to close mics instantly make the sound too much with pooping unwanted strikes. I always forgetting how to use it. Downloaded some multitrack stems to play with and fuguring out how to allign drum tracks with everything. Have a lite version of inPhase, but i guess it's different. Very interesting! Thanks!
Very solid info - really like your distinction between more punch (if aligning all mics to OH) vs more/keeping the depth if you’re not aligning close mics to OH. Knowing what different methods actually do and how it can play a significant role in the end result is king - I haven’t seen anyone explaining it this clear before, so big thanks again! The inPhase plugin is a bit confusing, but I’m going to have a new ‘battle’ with this again, very good examples you showcased here. 👍😀 Question: Do you have a method of getting the best phase relation between the kit and the room mics? Thanks in advance!
The perception of 3D is caused by phase alignment and delay of certain tracks, this creates this pseudo wide stereo effect. This can be achieved as well later but in a much healthier manner.
The way i thought of it when i phase align the drums punch pops out like you said at the cost of depth, but my justification is that i find adding punch that was lost after the fact may be more destructive than adding stereo fx later (using phase safe methods like dimension expanders ect).
Very interesting and useful. I'm going to wonder out loud ... do you think that the diminution in size when the spot mics are all fully aligned to the overheads, is really more about the transients & punch being so loud that they mask the sustain and room tone? With all that punch it sounded to me like it needed more cymbals / overheads afterwards, and pushing them up, and particularly any serious compression, might bring back the size that seemed to be lost???
Very well done, thank you. I wonder if the issue of alignment between overheads and close mics comes down to whether or not you want to get "room" out of this. If I, instead, took the stance that I want to capture the full drum set from the overheads, and reinforce where and if needed with close mics, I would want to align them all. And the "room" I would have to get from other dedicated "room" mics. Does this make sense? (I have an inclination towards my idea, but would agree that it is all, as almost always, a matter of taste and judgment on a case by case basis.)
I think it's more about how it sits in terms of overall 3 dimensionality. But for some records where everything just wants to be IN YOUR FACE, the 3 dimensionality may not matter, or may be getting masked by like heavy guitars or such.
I use Steven Slate Drums 5 VST instrument which gives individual outputs for multiple mics e.g. Snare top, bottom, overheads, rooms etc should I assume that they are all automatically in phase or do you think the techniques you share in this excellent video also apply to sampled drum programs like SSD5 and Toonrack Superior Drummer 3?
That's a really good question. To be honest I'm not sure. My limited experience with SSD is that the drums already sound really clean and punchy and have solid depth just the way they show up in the sampler, so I'd say whoever is engineering the samples is taking these things into consideration.
I’ve watched every damn video regarding this plugin, and I just don’t understand how to set it up. All the routing gets too convoluted and confusing for me. Sound Radix is very simple. You just put the plugin on ever channel and boom, they’re all connected.
