"Plastic surgery for the entire head" - studio mindset rejig

No mind. Feeling. Listen to what it feels like. You can not easily jump between two mindsets, so do all the janitor work in your project first, take a break, perform. Better to have someone to push buttons while you just BE.

The best thing about having someone else engineer is that you can just focus on getting sounds you like in the room and performance.

Take that as far as you can and then everything else should come naturally. Good luck!

The kit will stay put, so we're off to a good start on that front. And yeah, I'll do all to document what Oz gets up to. 

I won't get fancy, I assure you. I'm trying to use this session to inspire to me not "be lazy" more than anything!

There's probably not enough air in my studio to justify more than a single close mic on an amp. 

My vox engineering chops - very variable! I did two songs with the Roswell K67 the other night. One was fine... sounded like me and wasn't problematic (nasal or essy etc). The other song had a terrible vocal! I think I was a bit stuffed up by then, and my voice was a bit tight, but it's impressive how NOT good the recording sounded. My voice is really material dependent!

I loved working with Oz when he mastered my recent album, so I don't dout this will be an enjoyable session. His skills as engineer are vast, but he's just a far-out guy with a mind for the abstract. That's as important to me as anything...

Haven't read the other replies yet.  I wanted to get my thoughts out there before reading the others..

I don't know what DAW you use or really any of the other details like mics and preamps, but it might not matter as much as you think.  I track drums all the time and I've been told that I have one of the best local drum sounds around, and I'm in a basement with a pretty dead sounding room.   

Drums and the "drum room sound" is totally overrated.  Anyone who says you need a big room and lots of mics and whatever is totally selling you something.  

The key is the drum head choice, the drum tuning and the mic choice to a lesser degree.

Learning to tune drums is a skill that's both artistry and science.  Every drum will have a head that works best at a certain note and produce the type of sound you want to hear *through the mics*.  I've had drummers bring me the shittiest drumsets with duct-taped heads and DEMAND using their kits in the studio, so I spend a while replacing heads and fixing rattles and squeaks and tuning their drums and I've yet to find a set that didn't become recordable with all that work.  Even the cheapest shells can sound good with the right heads. 

It's also very important to understand that the type of head that might sound good playing live might not be the best for recording.  Most drum sets come with thin heads for loudness and projection while playing live and people tend to just replace the heads with more of the same.  I suggest going to something like Evans G2 or Remo pinstripes on batters and something thinner on bottoms.  Snare should get something with a dot on top so the pitch doesn't bend so much when hitting it.  I like Remo Powerstroke 77 or Emperor CS dot on top.  

Drum mics are there for a reason.  Some will tell you that the room mics and/or overheads are for the kit sound and the drum mics are there for fill, but I find it's the other way around for me.  Close mics get the body of the sound for the drums and should be chosen for that purpose.  I would choose a mic that can get the most of the part of the sound I want.  To that end, I use ATM25 mics on toms because they were originally kick drum mics meant for low end pickup and off-axis rejection.  I now use a KMS105 on snare because it picks up a very wide range and the off-axis rejection is amazing for picking up a good bright attack.

I don't think the preamp matters much here.  Drums are all about the attack and the sustain rather than frequency response itself.  Any decent preamp will work for that.

I actually don't do much processing on drums overall.  Snare typically gets some surgical EQ to cut the weird ringing overtones in the low mids as well as HPF and LPF the unneeded stuff.  Snare gets Pro-MB in expand mode set so that the high frequencies above 1K are being cut about 10dB for cymbal bleed.  Then it gets some SSL EQ for boosting a little bottom and top.  Toms get a lot of mid cut to get rid of the off-axis bleed and focus the sound on the low fundamental and top end attack and then they also get ruthlessly edited so only the hit remains.  Kick gets surgical EQ but also gets ruthlessly edited so that only the kick hit remains.  I don't use gates on drums usually.  Overheads are positioned to get the cymbal groups and they are EQ'd so that only the most basic cymbal sound remains and then a few surgical cuts to remove the ringing overtones.  Cymbal spot mics are usually low in the mix unless I need accents and they are typically EQ'd heavily.  

Each drum is usually grouped into folders in Reaper so that I can use fewer plugins.  If the kick drum group (in and out) needs a EQ move, then I do it to the main Kick folder rather than use the same move on multiple EQ plugins, and so forth.  Instead of having a channel strip plug for each track I'll try to use a single stereo instance on a folder.  Same for compressors/gates/etc.  

So I end up with maybe a dozen plugins across 15 drum tracks that are arranged under maybe 5 or 6 folder groups.   

Volume automation moves are generally done on the upper folders rather than on the tracks.  

Great info, and you do get a great drum sound! I can’t let you diss on big rooms though 🤣! have to defend the big drum room guys.

When you are in a small room, you must work like a dog to get tuning to work. You may get the perfect tone, then you start on the next drum and it’s blowing up the snares and rattling anything not taped down. So you find a killer tone on that drum, now the snare is resonating the floor Tom every hit. So you have to mess some more.

If the room is big enough.. whatever tuning is your favorite is a go. You can have the snare and toms tuned exactly how you like. The taping down and slaving away is minimized because the reflections aren’t blowing up everything. Outdoors is where it’s really evident

Otherwise.. great post! Im certain most of my favorite albums were done is small-ish rooms where they worked the kit until it was good

There is a big difference between needing a big room and wanting one.  You don't need one!  However, if you want one and you have the ability to have one, then go for it!

Regarding drum kit - tuning, heads etc…

ibb.co/SPs85xC

Well, that would be one very specific sound...  

There were some old time drummers who didn't believe in changing drum heads, that the "tone" would emerge from usage and only a broken head should ever be replaced.

And then you have the producers who would change a snare head between every single song during tracking..

That kick drum even sounds big on my iPhone.

Yes sir me Bob 8)