Our studio

Welcome to our small, but perfectly formed cymbal studio. This is where we record all our stock cymbals. We built the space and almost all the internal sound treatments ourselves and we're very proud of it.

We used a balance of diffusion and absorption on the walls and ceiling to achieve a neutral sounding room. We record all our cymbal sound files without EQ, compression, plug-ins, filters or sound processing of any kind. This allows you to hear the real acoustic sound of the cymbals.

We spent a long time experimenting with different sound treatments and mics. As you can see our studio monitors are right at the kit in the drummers playing position. It took many (many!) hours of recording, listening and adjusting everything until we were happy that the cymbals sounded the same in our recordings as they did live in the room.

The mics & equipment

We use a simple 3 mic set up to capture the most natural and organic sound of the cymbals and drums. Nothing is close miced. The 2 over heads are about 2 meters off the floor, and the bass drum mic is around 30cm from the front skin.

The mics are an Earthworks DK-25R set. They are extremely flat response mics specifically designed to capture the real acoustic sound of cymbals and drums. Their signal passes through an Audient interface, which has very neutral drivers and adds little or no colouration of its own. That sound is fed into our DAW and we don't add or take anything away from this raw signal. That's our approach - direct from cymbal to sound file with nothing changed along the way.

If you have any questions about our sound files