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#1683441 - 07/27/05 07:03 PM

The first drum thread

J.J. Blair
Senior Member

Registered: 07/22/05
Posts: 326
Loc: Hollywood, CA

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Next to an orchestra, perhaps the hardest thing to learn to record well is drums. One of the most difficult things about it is you have several mics and lots of possibilties for things to be out of phase. I thought I'd post some stuff from a session I did the other day that might be informative to some of the guys who haven't had a chance to record live drums, or who haven't been happy with the drums they have recorded.

The first thing is that you have to start with good sounding drums, which includes the drum, the heads and having them tuned well. There's no point in recording crap drums and then sound replacing them. I usually tune my own drums, even though I'm not really a drummer. But if you want to be an engineer known for good drum sounds, learn to tune. There are plenty of resources on the web to teach you this.

The next thing is to have the right mics. There isn't a right or wrong mic. Somebody played me something with this amazing floor tom sound, and I was shocked to find a Shure SM57 on the tom. Just use your ears and know your gear. Take downtime to experiment with different mics and different situations and you might be surprised what you choose.

For some reason, everything I record tends to sound like 1973. That's just where my head is at naturally. Sometimes I'll think that either an older or a newer sound is more appropriate, but my style and my sound is based what I consider the golden era of rock, the early '70s. Occasionally I'll do some other techniques, but most of the time, the alpha and omega of my drum sound is the so called Glynn Johns isosceles triangle. It's the use of three mics set around the kit. One over the snare pointing down and panned hard right. One over behind floor tom pointing at the snare panned hard left. You also have to make sure that mics are equidistant fromthe center point on the snare. (That's what makes it isoscelean.) And then you put a third mic in front of the kick panned up the center. You can use different distances, and I'll explain that in a when I describe the lay out below. But the combination of those three mics gives you a perfect stereo image of the kit.

Now, I also cloe mic everything. What I find part of the advantage of using the three mic technique is that it minimizes imaging inconsistencies when you start panning the close mics. It also adds a nice ambient sound to compliment the close mics and minimizes phase incoherency. In addition to this, depending on the size of the room, I'll use one or two distant placed room mics.

So here's what we've got going on below and the signal path:
AKG D12 in the kick through a Neve 1073 and EQ'd
Neumann M49 out front through a Neve 33115
Neumann UM57s above and behind the tom through 33115s with some 10k shelf added and compressed in a Neve 33609
AKG D19 and Shure SM57 on top of the snare and Sennheiser MD441 through Langevin AM16s (the old ones) and EQ'd on a Vac Rac tube EQ
AKG D19s on the toms through API 312s
Altec 175 on the hi hat through Shep SN8 Neve clone
RCA BK11 across the room (not pictured) through a Neve 1073 and crushed to death through an 1176 with all four buttons in

The reason for the foam is because I find the snare mics sound better that high up, but I might get some bleed from the hi hat. I tend to compress the snare during the mix, and that can make an open hi hat really loud. The piece of foam was to act as a mini gobo.

Now the thing with the front mic is that I solo it with the mic that's right on the kick. I move the front mic until it is phasing in a thumpy low end. I then check those against the OHs and the snare. Sometimes i have to reverse the phase of the OHs, because the combination with the kick and front makes the snare and toms sound thin. I always recheck that sort of thing with the close mics, too.

Here's the drums solo'd. First is the kit, then the D12 solo'd, then the D12 and the M49 together, then the M49 solo'd, then the M49 and OHs together so you can hear the triangle by itself, then the room mic, then everything together, then everything without the room mic so you can hear what it adds, and then everything for about 15 secs to the end. The reason I like to use a ribbon on the room is because they are so dark, and it causes less cymbal swimming when you crush it with a compressor. Using a bright mic can be a real problem in that regard. Also the dark wooliness is left to decay when you crush it, which gives the room the illusion of sounding bigger, and adds tone to the snare and toms.

http://homepage.mac.com/jjblair/.cv/jjblair/Sites/.Public/drums.mp3-zip.zip

BTW, the snare in the recording is not the snare pictured. The snare recorded was 4" deep maple Gretsch.
Hopefully you can download and listen to the files OK.

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