eDrumSessions Founder Performs With Country Legend Dolly Parton

Recently session drummer and eDrumSessions founder Shay Godwin played at an an event featuring Country music industry luminaries, including Dolly Parton.

Here are a couple of pics of session drummer Shay Godwin with Parton:

Session drummer Shay Godwin provides drum tracks online to clients worldwide. For his online drum tracks and for all recording sessions he has control over, Bell Sound in Hollywood is the place to go. Session drummer and string quartet alike enjoy the large, Vincent Van Haaf-designed tracking room. Drum tracks exhibit separation and clarity. eDrumSessions is a full service online recording studio, ready for online drum tracks, guitar tracks, bass tracks, string tracks, pedal steel tracks, lap steel tracks, horn tracks, vocal tracks, mixing, mastering, and anything else you could need. We have top quality session drummers available, as well as session guitarists and any other instrument you need. Let eDrumSessions.com give your music the life you envision. It starts with the drum tracks!

Custom Drum Recording Studios: Great Tracking And Control Rooms Are A Must

Having quality instruments, microphones, and recording gear is definitely important in achieving the highest quality recorded sounds for custom drum recording. But without a well-designed tracking and control room, it won’t mean much. If you want to ensure excellent drum sounds from an online drum tracks service, it really helps to have some understanding of their room situation.

A proper live room for tracking a session drummer should ideally be large, so that the sound waves can mature and early reflections are minimized. Of course, smaller rooms can benefit from creative sound control devices such as absorbers and diffusers, but there’s nothing like the sound of real drums in a large live room for maximum clarity and impact.

Here’s why: When “trapping” a smaller room with acoustic devices you end up with drums that tend to sound boxy and small. Because the air around the kit is literally being absorbed and controlled, the kit never gets to “breathe”, producing a dry and boxy sound with your drum tracks. This is most easily heard in the Overhead and Room mics. Also, the smaller footprint also emphasizes lower midrange frequencies — you know, the ones that that produce those nasty nasal tones you can never really dial out once recorded. The low end also has no room to naturally expand, thus rendering your kick sounds anemic. This all means small drum sounds.

Regardless of room size, a live room must have a decent balance of hard surfaces (reflection) and soft surfaces (absorption). Importantly, the reflective surfaces should be broken up as much as possible, i.e. few parallel surfaces. This again produces the most natural recordings even amongst the many individual elements of a close mic’d drum kit. The separation and clarity the drums tracks will exhibit in a properly designed space is a revelation to hear – and once you hear your drum tracks this way you’ll never go back!

The control room is just as important as the live room, because for an engineer to get good drum sounds he needs to be able to hear accurately. Merely placing good equipment in a sub standard room is not good enough. You’d never cook a fancy meal in a dirty kitchen, yet why do so many engineers choose this route? Because properly designed rooms aren’t cheap to design, cheap to build, or cheap to implement!

Good speakers are good speakers. They were designed and manufactured under strict tolerances and in well-tuned environments. They are made to be used in proper spaces that won’t skew the acoustic frequency response and dynamic output, much like a Ferrari is designed to be driven on a race track. Putting one in traffic during rush hour would be compromising its performance characteristics. It would also compromise and skew the driver’s opinion of the car, thus rendering his judgment incorrect.

Performance speakers in a poor room ends up with the same results. Every day, recording engineers listen to their expensive speakers in flawed rooms and end up making very poor EQ and mic placement choices through no fault of their own. Their speakers and room in concert are lying to them. And they don’t know it! Thus, your drum tracks are flawed and incorrectly balanced – inhibiting you from producing truly stunning mixes of your precious material.
As there are many online session drummer services, there are many different types of room being used. These rooms range from closets and bedrooms in houses to large, professionally designed rooms in commercial recording studios.

Obviously going with rooms designed professionally for the purpose of recording is generally going to be the best idea. Such rooms are designed to be acoustically “flat”. This means that the room dimensions and construction are such that no frequencies are boosted, or attenuated, by the room itself and have the geometric properties previously discussed.

Before we look at professional rooms, lets take a general look at the many session drummers who operate in a home studio situation.

It is possible to get great drum sounds in a house. I have been session drummer on recordings done in houses that sound amazing. Some famous artists have made recordings in houses with excellent results, such as The Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main Street”.

But more often than not, session drummers operating out of home studios have huge acoustical issues they are not even be aware of, and have tuned neither their tracking room nor control room. Often they just “deaden” things in the room, controlling some high-frequency issues by over-using soft materials but doing nothing for low-frequency issues.

Then there is the other end of the spectrum: professionally designed tracking and control rooms in a commercial recording studio.

For an example of a modern standard in studio design, one can look to rooms by the great Vincent Van Haaf. Van Haaf is the designer and architect of rooms in many studios, including the famous Conway Studios of Los Angeles. The main idea of the Van Haaf approach involves the use of geometry and space. There will be NO parallel surfaces. A control room should be symmetrical from a central line for the purposes of exact stereo imaging.

Van Haaf likes air to be the absorber and diffuser instead of relying on soft, diffusive materials (or as he puts it, “absorption by cotton ball”). This concept applies to both the live and control room.

Those are the basics, but the icing on the cake of Van Haaf’s control room design approach is the ceiling design. It involves designing the room like a big speaker horn, in which the ceiling is angled up and away from the monitors. This kind of design ensures the entire room will be a sweet spot.

As you can see, the design of the control room and tracking room of a studio has as much to do with sound quality of your drum tracks as anything. It is probably the most important factor after the expertise of the recording engineer.

It is worth noting that many online session drummers use the same rooms as tracking room and control room. This is generally to be avoided.

The point is to inquire about the rooms an online session drummer uses if no info is given on the site. If the session drummer records in a house, you don’t need to rule that service out but you must investigate the properties of the rooms.

Ask about dimensions, and request some pictures if none are provided on the site. If you like what you see on the site, you will want to ensure the pictures displayed are indeed the tracking and control rooms being used by the session drummer and engineer.

Online Recording Studio: Working For Universal Music Group

eDrumSessions.com provides studio services to clients worldwide from Los Angeles. Of course some clients are right in L.A., including Universal Music Group.

In the below video, session drummer Shay Godwin (founder of eDrumSessions) records drum tracks for a Universal library called “Killer Tracks.”

Since this client is in Los Angeles, he came to our recording studio to produce this session. However, even if you are on the other side of the planet you can produce sessions in real time at eDrumSessions. Through the use of NiceCast, our clients can listen in on the recording session live from anywhere in the world (no extra fee for this sevice) and communicate via Skype, iChat, or phone. This is like being in the control room with engineer Thai Long Ly; you can produce the recording session in real time. We encourage this as it keeps the communication high and ensures total satisfaction. Most online recording studios do not offer this option, usually going for a “keep the client at arm’s length” approach.

For clients who do not wish to or cannot schedule a remote recording session, we usually do three takes of a song to give the composer some options. Of course if a chart is sent that is adhered to. This online recording studio is full of professionals of all flavors, and we have musicians that can read fly paper.

The eDrumSessions recording studio is outfitted with top notch gear all around. Vintage Neve 8232 console, modern outboard pres such as the brilliant Geoff Daking models, the most amazing mic locker you could imagine. The tracking room is a masterpiece, designed by the masterful Vincent Van Haaf. Haaf designed the tracking rooms at the legendary Conway Studios.

Online Drum Tracks: UK Commercial With Session Drummer Shay Godwin

eDrumSessions founder Shay Godwin recently recorded drum tracks for a UK television ad now airing.

The ad, for GoCompare (UK auto insurance company), is comedic in nature and references the movie “One Million Years B.C.” The feel of the music is shuffle, ironically sounding more like an American shuffle than a Brit-pop shuffle.

Online recording studio eDrumSessions.com is increasingly called upon for studio services by overseas production houses writing commercial music.

Session drummer Godwin recorded the drum tracks online for client Yellow Boat Music, a U.K. commercial production house. These sessions are done remotely, with producer Paul Cartledge communicating in real time via Skype, and listening in on the drum tracks recording session live via NiceCast.

Most commercial recording sessions involve two to three versions of the same song. This is done for different edits of the commercial. Only two edits were done for this session.

This commercial features opera star Gio Compario.

It is becoming common in these modern times for musical collaborations to take place between different nations because of the internet. Online recording studios are becoming an industry mainstay, due to cost-effectiveness of international collaboration that was once extremely expensive due to travel costs.

Here is a press release about the commercial, in which both session drummer Godwin and Yellow Boat Music are mentioned.

Online Drum Tracks: Aquarian Drumheads And eDrumSessions.com, Part 1

As a professional online session drummer, I record online drum tracks in many different styles. This may require different drumhead choices, so it is important for me to have many drumhead choices.

In this two-part article series I will describe some of the Aquarian products I use when recording online drum tracks at eDrumSessions. I am not being compensated by Aquarian for this article. However, in the interest of full disclosure I will mention that I am an endorser of Aquarian products. I use Aquarian drumheads in any situation which I have control to do so, and that would certainly would apply to online drum tracks I do through eDrumSessions.

In this first installment, the following products I use for online drum tracks will be covered: Texture Coated, Classic Clear, American Vintage, Modern Vintage, Texture Coated with Power Dot, Jack DeJohnette signature, and Super Kick 1. All of these are one-ply models I use for online drum tracks.

Lets begin with good old Texture Coated heads. Texture Coated heads are my first choice for general playing. The Aquarian coating process has become the industry leader. Chipping almost never happens, and the sound of brush “sweeps” remain nicely even-sounding through many recordings of online drum tracks. It is advantageous to have the surface not get too smooth too fast from brush playing.

I also use Classic Clear heads. Using them as bottom tom heads is a given. If I need more articulation out of my toms, I go to the Classic Clear heads as batter heads as well. I tend to favor the warmth of coated heads in general, but some online drum tracks may call for intricate tom work. One can always tune coated heads tighter to achieve more articulation, but that may not be the best option depending on the style of music. The Classic Clear heads are very useful if I need to tune the toms low but still need a lot of articulation. Again, I default to coated heads. “Tribal” tom work, for instance, can lose some of its weight with clear heads. This is applicable to all clear heads from any manufacturer, not just Aquarian.

The last time I used Classic Clear heads for online drum tracks was on a song for a client from Azerbaijan. The song was an up-tempo, fusion-esque song that called for a lot of articulate tom work, as well as some soloing on my part. I went for the Classic Clears to get that articulation. Although some warmth was sacrificed, for that particular piece of music it was a wise choice.

I have also gotten good results using them on my Ludwigs for a Bonham-esque sound for with of my online drum tracks clients.

American Vintage heads are slightly larger in diameter to fit vintage drums. They have a special coating that is different than the Texture Coated heads. The coating is more textured, which means louder brush sweeps. This is not usually a concern for online drum tracks, but it is helpful live.

The coating on the American Vintage model sounds warmer than Texture Coated heads. Of course some of the attack is minimized, unless they are tuned really tightly. They sound great tuned tightly for straight-ahead jazz music. These heads also sound amazing on my vintage Ludwigs, tuned in any range. They sound beautifully warm and “squishy” when tuned down low, and are a great choice for online drum tracks that require few but dramatic tom hits.

Modern Vintage heads have the same general properties as American Vintage, but are made to fit modern drums. This enables me to get a vintage sound out of a modern kit for online drum tracks.

In Part 2 of this series, I will discuss my use of Texture Coated with Power Dot heads, Jack DeJohnette Signature heads, and Super Kick 1 heads on online drum tracks.