Recording A Big Drum Set: Opinions and/or Suggestions

[scopeboy]

Well, I guess you could find a lot of fans amongst people who liked Rush but thought Neil Peart's drum set was too small ;D I'm fired with curiosity to know what your band sounds like now! Have you got any material online I can listen to?

I don't know much about mic'ing drum kits but we're going to a fancy studio tomorrow and I'll keep a close eye on the engineer when he mics our (normal sized!) kit.... I remember him placing the overheads with a measuring tape last time, so I guess he was getting them both the same distance away from the snare like a previous poster mentioned?

From the little I know about recording, and especially since you're short of tracks, I'd be thinking about close micing the main drums that are being used most of the time to beat out the rhythm, and then using a coincident pair (I guess that's the same as X-Y axis you mentioned) of overhead mics to pick up all the extra stuff and spread it across the stereo soundstage in roughly the places it actually is. Hopefully you end up with a realistic stereo picture of your drum kit and the ability to adjust the main drums seprarately. And since you said you had a 6-track recorder, kick, snare, hi-hat, ride and two overheads makes 6 tracks :-)

I kind of have a fetish for coincident mics (crossed cardioids or figure-of-8s or whatever) but I do think they would have an advantage in this situation. They won't have phasing with each other since they're very close together. And if you dangle them above the kit so they're about the same distance from all the close mics (apart from the kick, I guess, that would be tricky) then you should be able to get rid of phasing by moving the overhead mic tracks slightly forward in time in your DAW. Not that I know anyone who bothers with fancy stuff like that :P

[Starcross]

Hey Scopeboy,

I hope Rick (in10city) won't mind me posting a link for him. I'm also a member of Farpoint along with him. We do have some songs up at our myspace page:
www.myspace.com/farpointmusic.
All these songs are from our last cd. Keep in mind, they are mp3's, so not quite cd quality.
Thanks!

Edit: May I suggest starting with "Sojourn"? It's 10 minutes long but it's my favorite!

[brandondrury]

From the little I know about recording, and especially since you're short of tracks, I'd be thinking about close micing the main drums that are being used most of the time to beat out the rhythm, and then using a coincident pair (I guess that's the same as X-Y axis you mentioned) of overhead mics to pick up all the extra stuff and spread it across the stereo soundstage in roughly the places it actually is. Hopefully you end up with a realistic stereo picture of your drum kit and the ability to adjust the main drums seprarately. And since you said you had a 6-track recorder, kick, snare, hi-hat, ride and two overheads makes 6 tracks :-)

While the micing scheme may be the same, I think this the exactly opposite approach to what I would recommend. Simply close micing the drums you hit the most means you are choosing your mic placement based on some sort of thought process...and not on what you are hearing!!

I totally recommend starting with the overheads first. Close mics almost always sound like shit to me. They never sound real. They just sound wrong to me. If all you have is close mics, mixing is going to be very difficult, more than likely.

I kind of have a fetish for coincident mics (crossed cardioids or figure-of-8s or whatever) but I do think they would have an advantage in this situation. They won't have phasing with each other since they're very close together.

You mean that the mic itself is in phase with itself and maybe you can pick up two sources with one mic. This would help. However, if you still end up using the same number of microphones, the chance for phasing is just as great. In fact, the figure 8 pattern, COULD even cause more phasing problems than a tigher cardiod pattern.

Brandon

[In10city]

Thanks for the suggestions and interest Scopeboy.

Thanks for the link Starcross

As always, thanks for everything Brandon...

Here's my plan:

Audio Technica AE2500 dual element mic inside kick drum, after trial and error test recordings I'll subgroup both mic inputs to record channel 1.

Audio Technica snare mic on top with phase reversed and Carvin condensor mic on bottom subgrouped into record channel 2.

Audio Technica Pro-37R's for left and right overhead, recorded into channels 3 and 4 and panned hard left and right.

Recording channel 5 will be left for any close mics necessary on toms, likely the biggest floor toms.

Recording channel 6 will be for the room ambiance mic. I don't know which mic I'll use or even where I'll put it, that will be determined through tiral and error.

I'm off to an overseas deployed location for a month but I'll try to check back now and then if I can access to a computer to see what other nuggets of information I can glean. Once I get everything dialed in, I may try to post up a drum track for everyone to pick apart and help me feel less qualified but that will probably be closer to the November time frame.

Later!

[brandondrury]

Audio Technica snare mic on top with phase reversed and Carvin condensor mic on bottom subgrouped into record channel 2.

I'd be very careful with this one. The relationship between the snare top and bottom mics is usually a tough one and it can be drastically different in every situation.

Honestly, if I was in the same situation as far as inputs are concerned, I wouldn't record the snare bottom at all. At least, I'd lean in that direction. Try it and see. If you really like your snare sound on the recording, great. Otherwise, the snare bottom would be the first thing I'd leave off.

I find myself using the snare bottom exclusively as a reverb send ( 0% of the dry signal getting through the mix). I just usually don't like the way the bottom sounds. It has the crack, but the crack is weird sometimes.

Brandon

[In10city]

Well it's been a while so I'll post the update on where I stand and what I've learned so far. The drums are really starting to sound the way I want on playback after some trial and error test recording.

The kick drum is mic'd with an Audio Technica AE2500 dual element mic and subgrouped into 1 channel. We have added compression and dampening to each element individually and the kick is really sounding good. Lots of thump with a bit of 'wet punch' and low resonance but clean.

The snare is mic'd with a Audio Technica MB5K and get's it's own track. Originally I tried a condensor on the bottom and an in-line phase reverse on the top mic (the in-line phase reverse would not allow phantom power to pass through) and it sounded "ok" but not impressive enough to justify using them both. On test recording the snare got real thin in the mix so we figured there was some phase problems happening. I also had to do some tweaking on my snare drums to get a good thick sound. No now I'm left with 1 mic on the snare top side and no in-line phase reverse thingy and it sounds great.

The snare was really buzzing when I played the 10" tom and I could not tune either of them enough to get rid of it. I ended up folding a peice of paper to fit between the snare wires and the snare side head. I used some scotch tape to hold the paper in place (it is NOT taped to the resonant head). It removed almost all the sympathetic buzz from other drums and really dried out the snare sound. It's got a good meaty crack now and sounds better on recording than I expected.

I was not getting the precision I wanted out of my hi-hat and a lot of the stuff I was playing on them was getting lost in the mix. I put a condensor mic on the hi-hat running to a channel by itself for later volume and eq control within the final mix. I want to hear the hi-hat closing when I'm just playing it with my foot during certain passages of our songs. The mic is also picking up the smaller diameter toms much better and giving them the punch I was looking for.

I'm using 2 Audio Technica Pro-25 mics on the right side 16" tom and the left side 13" toms to capture the deep resonance. The overheads really pick up the stick to head impact but these close mics get the deep overtones well. I'm running them both into 1 channel for "toms".

Finally I'm using 2 Audio Technica Pro-37R mics for overheads. This was pretty tricky finding a good position for them. I started with them on 1 stand with an adaptor (holds 2 mics on 1 stand) directly behind the set, facing away from each other at 45 degrees and centered behind the snare drum. No good. Then I put them 45 degrees towards each other but the cymbals were way too loud. Next, we put them on individual stands, behind the drums, facing across each other. Still getting a bit too much cymbal noise so we adjusted them to face their own sides.

While standing behind the drums, the left overhead is facing the left side 8" tom. The right overhead is facing the right 12" and 13" toms. We started with them the exact same distance from the center of the snare drum but the right side overhead ended up with the big China, small splash stack and 18" crash in it's face. I moved the right overhead in and aimed it more towards the drums and voila!

Originally I was using a 'room ambiance' microphone and we did a lot of trial and error finding a good position for the mic. It was a cheap Radio Shack PZM plate mic that picks up a surprising dynamic range. The room mic was not really adding anything significant to the overall sound so I ditched it and used that track for the hi-hat.

So to summarize:

Recording
Track 1 Kick Drum AE2500 2 Mixer channels subgrouped into 1.
-Compression and gate inserted on both element channels
Track 2 Snare Drum MB5K
Track 3 Toms 2 AT-25s subgrouped into 1
-individual EQ on each channel
Track 4 Hi Hat Carven condensor (not sure of model #)
Track 5 Left Overhead Pro-37R Direct out from board
-behind drummer's left shoulder, aimed at 8" tom
Track 6 Right Overhead Pro-37R Direct out from board
-behind drummer's right shoulder, aimed at 12" and 13" toms, placed just "inside" the line of big cymbals.

I'm waiting on a new resonant kick head and then I'll put new heads on all the drums. I'm still rehearsing the songs to get as proficient as possible before I start final recording.

I've learned so much this time around thanks largely to this forum. Trial and error is my friend. I have about 20 hours of trial and error so far with test recordings, snare drum tuning and tweaking, and experimentation. I'll continue to record my rehersals and then listen to those recordings on different systems but I think it's pretty close now.

[brandondrury]

Dude,

It sounds like you are getting it. "it" being a great drum sound and "it" also being how recording really works. It just takes time to find the sweet spots. It's very difficult to properly capture an instrument in 10 minutes unless you have already went through the process with the same instrument before in the same room.

I'd be VERY conservative with the gate settings on your kick drum. In order for your kick drum to sound good, you will have to hit it hard (with your foot I mean). If you are hitting your kick drum hard, I couldn't imagine it really benefiting much from a gate.

It's possible that the gate will help some....but it's also possible that the gate could totally wreck your kick drum if you have a part anywhere on your album where you hit it softly.

As long as your take your time and make sure you get every song exactly how you want it, you should be fine, but if you get in a hurry, it's possible that the gate could cause some serious damage.

You are probably aware of how much damage a gate can cause, but you may not expect that damage to occur on X part.

Just be careful with those damn gates.

I very very seldom use a gate unless I'm doing some sort of mixing trickery.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear you are doing well! I can't wait to hear this!

Brandon

[In10city]

Thanks for the "Gate warning", I'll do some more testing on some softer parts of our songs and see what happens. We have been messing with the gate settings all along looking for the sweet spots. What we are mainly trying to do is compress the peak volumes so they don't overdrive the signal. I'll have to look at the gate settings and make sure they are not too restrictive. We started with our live settings and fine tuned from there. I'm keeping a journal of all our settings and tape measurements of mic locations so I'll have a starting point the next time we set up to record.

I'll try to post up just the drum tracks to a short instrumental song in a month or so when I start recording final takes. I may leave the scratch bass and guitar parts in the mix just for a referance point but I'll drop the volume on them so all my mistakes and screw-ups will be painfully obvious.

[brandondrury]

What we are mainly trying to do is compress the peak volumes so they don't overdrive the signal.

This isn't a good reason to compress a kick drum. I compress kick drums beause I'm trying to bring out more or less attack. If I don't want the kick drum to clip, I turn it down.

It's possible that the use of a compressor in this manner could cause big time problems later, too. I've never compressed going to disk, although I'd love to have the outboard gear to do so.

Brandon

[In10city]

I can add compression to the kick drum track after recording it. The Paris soundcard has built in digital compression but I can also send the signal out to our Behringer compressor and return it. Give those choices, which would you be more inclined to consider?