Without Missing A Beat

Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

An interview with legendary drummer Omar Hakim, who discusses his personal studio, electric and acoustic kits, an acoustically treated room-within-a-room, and more.

BONUS MATERIAL
Web Clip 1: Go on a video tour of Omar Hakim's studio

As one of the world's elite drummers, Omar Hakim has worked with everyone from Sting to Michael Jackson to Weather Report to Miles Davis. He's known for playing a range of styles, including jazz, funk, R&B, and rock. Hakim is also a composer and will soon be releasing a new solo album, much of which he cowrote with keyboardist Scott Tibbs, with whom he performs frequently.

Hakim has been into personal-recording technology since his teenage years. Currently, he has a studio located in a loft in suburban Westchester County, just north of Manhattan. Its most unique feature is a modular, acoustically treated and soundproofed room that he purchased and had placed in the middle of his loft. Hakim uses the structure, which weighs 12,000 pounds, as his live room for recording his acoustic drum kit, and as his control room (see Fig. 1 and Web Clip 1).

In addition to conventional studio work, Hakim does frequent remote drum sessions from his studio, works on his own projects, and of late has begun mixing outside projects as well. His setup allows him to record both his acoustic and electronic kits, and it offers balanced acoustics for mixing. I recently had the opportunity to visit the studio and interview Hakim.

What are the dimensions of your recording room?

The interior dimensions of the room are 12 by 16 feet, with an 8-foot ceiling. The company that manufactures it is called Industrial Acoustics. It's modular, and made from 2-foot and 3-foot pieces that actually fit together like a puzzle. The room is floated, it's actually on floated bars.

Could it be moved?

It could be moved, it could be torn down and moved. It's not cheap to move it, because it takes a crew of guys.

I see that your electronic kit is outside of the sound room.

I can keep the [Roland] V-kit out here because there's no sound issue with the neighbors. Typically I do MIDI parts and V-Drum stuff out here. And then I can take the V-Drum brain into the main room and dump the data into my main system.

Which is …?

A [Digidesign] Pro Tools HD 3 system. This system out here is a Pro Tools LE setup. And I'm actually upgrading to an 003 interface today.

You do a lot of remote session work.

I've been doing that for more than 10 or 12 years. In the early to mid-1990s I had an [Alesis] ADAT system. I used to get the VHS tapes in the mail. And I can't tell you how many sessions I put my drums on ADAT tapes, spread over two tapes, and I FedExed that over to a producer on the West Coast or wherever, and he flew them into his system and they ended up on albums. I've been a big supporter of technology and new technology.

Have you always been tech savvy?

Even before home studios were the thing. My friend and I used to jury-rig recording systems together at my mom's house. We'd pull together different gear like a Tascam P.A. board and an Otari 4-track tape deck, and we'd wire our own patch bays and make our own cables. We used to do this as teenagers and in our early twenties. It was a fun thing to do and we were learning at the same time. So for me, when the home-recording thing started to take off, I was already in that mind-set of trying to create high-quality recordings at home. Then eventually the computer became the centerpiece of the home studio. I had the early versions of computer sequencers and MIDI interfaces and all that stuff. So I've been in this game since the '80s, really. When Pro Tools came along, and I saw the power of the whole TDM concept, and plug-ins, and working in the box, I was an early adopter.

You use both an acoustic kit and your V-Drums for recording. Is it a big transition to go between the two types of kits?

It's not much different than a guitarist going from a beautiful Taylor guitar, Martin guitar, or whatever to his favorite Strat or Tele. You are making a physical adjustment, but there are things that happen with that electric instrument that will never happen with the acoustic version of the instrument. That's been my experience with the V-Drums.

What's the advantage of the V-Drums?

I could have a drum set [on the V-Drums] where one of the cymbals could be a gong, the bass drum could be a djembe, the snare drum could actually be some weird, high-pitched African drum. I can mix and match the drum set into different things. I can also have a program change in the middle of the song, and actually play the body of the song with one kit and play a drum solo with a different kit. So from that standpoint, there's a lot of power, sonic power, that I can't get with an acoustic kit. But of course with an acoustic kit, there's the immediacy of the vibration of the air and the cymbals, and there's still a little bit more of my personality that comes through. But the electronic drum experience for me has been equally satisfying because the focus now is the sonic possibility, rather than the expectation for my electronic set to feel and play like my acoustic kit.

It seems like sampled cymbals never sound as realistic as real ones recorded acoustically. Do you ever record your drums with the V-Drums but track your cymbals acoustically?

Actually, I haven't had to. I guess because in the back of my mind, if I'm using an electronic drum set, I'm going for something. And I don't want it to necessarily sound just like a cymbal. I have amazing cymbals. So at that moment I'd rather just put up a real one. But when I am making electronic music, and I am using the V-Drums as an instrument, I will use the internal cymbal sounds, which actually are very good. This is the second-generation, top-line V-Drum kit, the TD-20 (see Fig. 2). The first one was the TD-10. The cymbals are greatly, greatly improved in the TD-20. So I've been able to use the cymbals, and I think when Roland added the position-sensing concept to the ride cymbal, that gave it a little more realism.

BONUS MATERIAL
Web Clip 1: Go on a video tour of Omar Hakim's studio