Phase aligning drums to get a tight Snare Sound – faTutorial [3]

Phase aligning drums can be a tedious process. Every audio engineer knows the story: You put a lot of time and effort into your recording to get the sound right, but then you can lose much of your audio quality due to horrible sounding Phase Cancellations in your mix. Say goodbye to thin and muddy sounding snares! In this #faTutorial I’m going to show you how to get a clear and punchy snare sound with manual Time / Phase Alignment by ear.

Phase Aligning drums by ear

Say goodbye to thin and muddy sounding snares! In this #faTutorial I’m going to show you how to get a clear and punchy snare sound with manual Time / Phase Aligning by ear. What I’m showing you today is what I call the “Main Microphone Alignment” technique in which you pick your most important mic out of the set and align all others to it. In case of a drum recording the snare is arguably one of the most important microphones.Of course, it’s not possible to eradicate all phase issues on a drum recording. But with this method we can reduce it to an acceptable level.

Choose the microphones you want to align the others to

Phase Aligning your drum kit should be the first task before you even start to begin the mixing process. We have to start with a clean slate. Often audio recording engineer confuse the terms “Time Alignment” & “Phase Alignment”. In a drum recording the time differences or even better “run time differences” are the most critical problem of the recording setup.

Snare & Kicks

It basically comes down to this: Firstly, align the snare top and the snare bottom microphone. Usually the snare bottom microphone has to be reversed in polarity. Then align both snare mics to the overheads. It’s beneficial if you have the same distance between the snare top and both overhead microphones. Now, we do exactly the same with our kick drum mics. If you do your drum alignment with this method you can already gain a lot of punch and clarity. In the example shown here we’ve gained almost 6dB which means we’ve doubled the loudness. That’s amazing!

Toms, Rooms & other mics

I hope you have now a better understanding on Phase aligning your drums now. In another (future) tutorial I will show you how to treat the rest of the mics (rooms, toms etc.). Have a look at faTimeAlign here: faTimeAlign product page.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. Be sure to leave a comment below.

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