Sometimes I get ideas while watching TV. Some ideas are great, others are dumb. I’m not sure where this one falls, but I guess that’s for you to decide. But anyway, I was watching That Big Football Thing when Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy” was used as bumper music to cut to commercial. After I mentioned it on Twitter, I got an idea: How would that main riff sound when played backwards? So, now I present the first in a series I’ll call Backwards Rock.
A word on the process: I mapped out the original riff (on graph paper, no less) then wrote it in reverse – i.e. beat four in measure four is now beat one in measure one. The bass and drums were not mapped out, but I played them with the original track in mind. Please enjoy, let me know what you think, and I have a few more of these that I’ll be posting soon. See you next time!
Over the Christmas/New Years break, my friend Brandon and I got together on two separate days and put a whole bunch of microphones to a test. Previously, I posted the guitar amp version of this test. Today, I present The Snare Drum Microphone Shootout.
Before I present the results, I must talk about the process. We tested ten different microphones during the course of this day. In order to eliminate as many variables as we could, the microphones were set up in as close to the same spot as we could get and I played every test the same way: Center hit, off-center hit, flam, nine-stroke roll. Also, I used the same drum (Mapex Pro M series) and the same pair of sticks (Vic Firth 5A, wood tip) throughout the whole process.
We had two of almost all of these microphones, so the snare drum is double-miked for all but a few tests (which I’ll disclose when we get to them) – one microphone on the top head, the other on the bottom placed right around the snares themselves. No EQ is placed on any microphone, but the phase is flipped on every microphone on the bottom head and some levels are adjusted for a more balanced sound. I also edited some takes to ensure that they don’t overlap.
Without further ado: Here are the results! Ten microphones, presented two at a time. The first microphone listed is panned hard left and the second is hard right.
Our first matchup is the ol’ standby facing one of its many challengers – Shure SM57 – vs. Blue EnCore 100i.
The interesting thing to me is the frequency responses of these microphones – clearly, some microphones picked up the shell of the drum better than others.
So, there you go. What do you think? Personally, I think I found my new snare drum microphone within my own collection thanks to this.
Ed Makes Things 