room mics for drums anyone?

F

foreverain4

New member
who here uses room mics in combo with close mics for drums. just curious what you do. i have not for the longest time, then, by accident i recorded some room with an sm58. it really added alot of depth to the drums. i typically set an sm58 in the live room on a stand for talk back. i accidently armed the track that it was routed to so it got recorded. needless to say, i used that mic for the rest of the session. this is an idea i had for a room mic. i have a mic that i can use in a figure 8 patern. could this essentially be a "stereo" room mic if i decode the signal by duplicating the track, reversing the phase then panning them hard? like the mid side techniqe? or do i absolutely need the center mic for this to work. what do you guys do for room mics?
 
Room mics can definately help. It's pretty common to compress the hell out of it to get as much room tone as possible. PZMs are popular for that also. Some tricks include putting the room mic in an adjacent room or closet. You can also slide the room mic track around to adjust the timing like you would a Predelay on a reverb. You might want to invert the phase of a room mic so it is in phase with the OH's. That just depends on the distances so play with it during setup.

You can't get a stereo image out of a figure 8 without an additional mic. If you flip the phase of a copy of the signal you will just cancel out everything. It's the flipped phase in combination with the mid mic that makes M/S work.
 
do you prefer stereo micing for room? or just one mic? in theory, one mic should work fine as, the farther away from the kit you are, the more focused the sound should be. am i way off on this?
 
Yes and no.

Yes, the farther away you are from the drum set, the more 'mono' it will be.

No, because the room response isn't mono at all, and it's the room response you want to capture, right?

So if you can afford it, mic it up in stereo or even in multiple stereo pairs. You can always dump tracks later.

David
 
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