Our studio

Welcome to my small, but perfectly formed cymbal studio. This is where I record all my stock cymbals. I built the space & almost all the internal sound treatments myself & I really love playing & recording in here..

I used a balance of diffusion & absorption on the walls & ceiling to achieve a neutral sounding room. I record all the cymbal sound files with no EQ, compression, plug-ins, filters or sound processing of any kind. This allows you to hear the real acoustic sound of the cymbals.

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

The mics & equipment

I use a simple 3 mic set up to capture the most natural & organic sound of the cymbals & drums. Nothing is close miced. The 2 over heads are about 2 meters off the floor & 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 & drums. Their signal passes through an Audient interface, which has very neutral drivers & adds little or no colouration of its own. That sound is fed into my DAW where I don't add or take anything away from the raw signal. That's my approach - direct from cymbal to sound file with nothing changed along the way.

If you have any questions about my sound files