Our studio

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

We used a balance of diffusion and absorption on the walls and ceiling which gives us a fairly neutral sounding room. Then we record our cymbal sound files with no EQ, compression, plug-ins, filters or sound processing of any kind. That 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 until we were happy that the cymbals sounded exactly 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 is extremely neutral 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 acoustic signal. That's our approach - direct from cymbal to sound file with nothing changed along the way.

The drums

We've used Craviotto and Gretsch drums in our sound files.

The Craviotto kit is a 12x7", 14x12" and 18x12" cherry with maple hoops. 

The Gretsch kit is a late 90s / early 00s Jasper shell Broadkaster 12x8", 14x14" and an 18x14" or 22x14" kick. 

The snare on all the recordings is a Craviotto 14x5.5" mahogany with BB/45º bearing edges.

The skins

The skins on most recordings are Remo ambassadors. We use coated ambassadors on the batter heads, smooth white ambassadors on the resonant heads. That applies to toms and kick drums. The snare is coated ambassador batter and a clear ambassador snare side. The "jazz kit" recordings have no dampening on any of the drums. The "pop kit" recordings have just a 1/2 or 1/4 piece of moon gel on the snare and toms, and a small towel roll in the kick. All kick drums were recorded without a resonant skin port.

We hope you enjoyed our little behind the scenes tour of Cymbal Junkie, and that it's given you a window into how we make our recordings. 

If you have any questions about our sound files