Taming The Beast..Or How Do I Mic A Death Metal Drummer?

[Village Idiot]

Here is the odd couple of the century.

And I kid you not...

I am actually taking on a Death Metal sounding band for their 4 song demo.

This is chock full of many cymbal crashes, and plenty of double kick pedal action.

Can anyone who has ever tracked this style of music tell me the ideal mic placement for this music? (Other than "Someone Else's House" )

The drummer has this set-up...
One 22" bass drum (With a double-kick petal)
Two mounted 14" and 12" toms.
One 18" floor tom.

16" crash far left
20" ride in center
18" crash to left
16" china splash to far left.

Is closed micing the answer here, or maybe a 3 or 4 mic placement?

I think I can pull this demo off for them with a little help..
Sure glad I'm a Drummer...That will help a bit.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

VI

P.S. I posed this question yesterday at Recpro...
20 views, no responses.
I figured they were looking at this like some people stare at a car wreck.

[Track Rat]

I've done this MANY times. My experience with these guys has been that they're too heavy handed when it comes to cymbals and especially hi hat. You'll want a hyper cardiod mic for the snare and positioned to minimize the hi hat into the snare track. Too much hat here will make it hell to get some snap into the snare without the hat taking the top of your head off. Tight mics on the toms is just about mandatory. Also along with the kick mic inside the drum positioned to taste, I always put a LDC out in front of the kick around three feet or so about as high as the top of the kick shell. This will really help to fill out the kick and the rest of the kit in general. With this many mics going I almost always go with X-Y overheads to help with any potential phase issues that could pop up. At this stage, I don't usually use compression while tracking. I save that for mix time. There I like to do parrallel compression. I'll get a decent drum mix going on the main stereo out. Then I set up a compressor on a pair of sub group out faders. I'll assign the kick, snare and toms (not the overheads) to this pair, step on it hard and push that up under the existing drum mix. You can add a LOT of power to the drum tracks like this. I keep the overheads out of this compressor as it can suck the life out of the cymbals. Speaking of which, hats and cymbals will be your biggest problem to keep under controll as most metel drummer's knuckels drag the ground when they walk. They hit these way too hard in proportion to the rest of the kit.
Good luck my friend.

[Village Idiot]

Thank you so much, Track Rat!

That is the stuff I was looking for.
The details you mentioned are really appreciated.

Any chance you could master these 4 tunes when we are done?

Talktomebaby.

VI

[Track Rat]

I can be had (just ask anyone ).

[mixmkr]

egg salad post, trackrat!

but...I think you just got lucky with your answer.

[manning1]

the ones ive recorded . how i did it.
1. ONLY USE 2 mics.
2. one mic crown pzm overhead, one on kick plus (and no FLAMES THIS WORKS !) a big huge speaker wired as a microphone on the kick.
(youll have to test various spkrs for a big fat kick sound)
also try a piezo trigger on kick or snare triggering sampled metal
kick and snare sounds. a tip - watch the levels coming from the
spkr wired as a mic as some can pin your meters. bring up inpuit
pre fader carefully.
3. have drummer play track TWICE for a big drum sound ,
and using different cymbal accents. now copy one track and duplicate it and introduce a slight offset on the copy and experiment with panning tricks..
I dont agree with using lots of mics on dm drums. just 2.
regards
bm

[LemonTree]

manning's back on the glue again

[Harvey Gerst]

We do a lot of death metal here. Usual setup is:

Kick: ATM25 inside, about 4" from the beater contact point, pointed at the beater contact point but angled towards the floor tom (to reduce snare bleed).

Snare: Beyer 201 or Shure 57, peeking over the rim about 1" above and 1" in, pointed at the center of the snare, nestled between the hihat and the first rack tom. If we decide to mic the bottom of the snare, it's usually with a Shure SM7 or SM57. We'll go thru several snares till we find the right sounding snare. We keep 6 or 7 different snares on hand.

Rack toms: Sennheiser 604's clipped to the top rims, pointed at the center of each tom, about 1" above and 1" in.

Floor toms: Sennheiser 421's or AT Pro 25, clipped to the top rim, pointed at the center of the tom, about 1" above and 1" in, coming in from the back of the tom.

Overheads: AEA R84s, MXL603s, MC012s, or Behringer ECM80000, depending on the sound we want. Usually one about 18 to 24" above the ride, and the other about the same height over the left crash.

Hihats: IF we do mic the hihats, we'll use a Shure SM7 or a Beyer 201, with the mic positioned on the back side of the hihats so that the hihats block the mic from hearing the snare. If the drummer is a hihat basher, we'll switch him over to our 12" Z "recording" hihats.

Room mic: Any large diaphragm mic we happen to have up, about 8 feet out and 4 to 6' high.

Before we put up any mics, we'll stand and watch the drummer play for a few minutes to see where he hits each drum and cymbal, then start placing mics so that they're out of the way of his drumming patterns.

On the board, we'll usually dial in the beater click (around 2 to 4 KHz) to emphasize it if need be, a little cut around 400 Hz to reduce mud, and some low boost at 50 to 80 Hz, depending on what the bass player is doing.

We'll roll off the bottom end of the snare (80Hz, and below), add some eq up higher 800 to 1,500 Hz to bring out the mid tone of the snare, and add some 10 to 12KHz to get the snare "crack".

Overheads are usually cut on the bottom end and some 12kHz added if needed.

We add a little tuned eq (both high and low eq) for each tom till we get the toms defined as possible. We don't use any gates or compessors when we're tracking, but we'll gate the toms, snare, and kick during mixdown.

Anyway, that's how we do it, usually. Hope this helps.

[ChristopherDawn]

Originally posted by manning1
the ones ive recorded . how i did it.
1. ONLY USE 2 mics.
2. one mic crown pzm overhead, one on kick plus (and no FLAMES THIS WORKS !) a big huge speaker wired as a microphone on the kick.
(youll have to test various spkrs for a big fat kick sound)
also try a piezo trigger on kick or snare triggering sampled metal
kick and snare sounds. a tip - watch the levels coming from the
spkr wired as a mic as some can pin your meters. bring up inpuit
pre fader carefully.
3. have drummer play track TWICE for a big drum sound ,
and using different cymbal accents. now copy one track and duplicate it and introduce a slight offset on the copy and experiment with panning tricks..
I dont agree with using lots of mics on dm drums. just 2.
regards
bm

Hey Manning. Do you have any samples we could hear of that? I'd be interested to hear how a double tracked drum set would sound.


Also Harvey, great post.

[Village Idiot]

Thanks for all the input, guyz!

I'm playing around with Track Rat's advice right now..

And of course, I will try out Sir Harvey Gerst's technique.

Manning? I'll actually give your style a shot out of pure curiousity.

It's so cool to have people like Track Rat and Harvey Gerst lay it all out for us lowly types.

VI

[Harvey Gerst]

Originally posted by Village Idiot
Thanks for all the input, guyz!

I'm playing around with Track Rat's advice right now..

And of course, I will try out Sir Harvey Gerst's technique.

Manning? I'll actually give your style a shot out of pure curiousity.

It's so cool to have people like Track Rat and Harvey Gerst lay it all out for us lowly types.

VI

Hardly "Sir anything", just Harvey. A lot of methods will work, that's just how we do it for most drummers. The biggest part of the sound depends on the drummer AND the drums. The hardest part is knowing when to stop screwing around with the sound and just hit Record.

[cellardweller]

Originally posted by LemonTree
manning's back on the glue again

Lemon, you make me proud to be of Scottish heritage!!!

[Han]

Listen to Harvey, this is how many profs do it.

We used to trigger the kick as well and record it in Cubase, so afterwards you can edit the mistriggered kicks. Works quite good with (death)metal.

You can even trigger the kick after recording by an Alesis D4.