Micing Drums with this selection of mics.

[lurgan liar]

Hey guys....Here are the mics i have at my disposal ...

MXL 990
MXL 991
Shure SM 58
Shure SM 58
Sennheiser e845

Any suggestions how i would go about micing a kit with these mics ....

I was going to unscrew the ball off the SM 58's and put one on snare and the other on the kick ...and use the 2 mxl's as overheads ....but where exactly would i put the over heads???

Thanks in advance

[metalhead28]

I would say the 58's and the e845 would work fine on toms and snare. I would fear that using the 990 and the 991 as stereo overheads might come off as somewhat unbalanced, I think you'd just have to experiment with placement of each one because I doubt they would be spaced out equal distances from the kit. With a 58 on the kick you are really gonna be lacking, but I'm sure you already know that. I have done such things in the past when I had a very limited mic selection and just cloned the track a couple of times with a shitload of EQ used differently on each track and ended up with some useable kick sounds. Good luck!

[lurgan liar]

Thanks metal head ....so would u suggest that i only use one of the condensers as an overhead ?

[metalhead28]

I wouldn't really know what to tell you there, I'm not sure how different those two mics sound. You might play around with placement though and end up with something great. A single overhead is not necessarily a bad thing tho. I've heard good stuff that way.

[Mark7]

You could put one of the MXLs over the floor tom pointing towards the snare and the other directly over the rack toms, with the E845 on the snare and one of the SM58s on the kick. Sum to mono at mixdown.

This is, I believe, known as the Glynn Johns method.

[Tim Brown]

Originally Posted by lurgan liar

Hey guys....Here are the mics i have at my disposal ...

MXL 990
MXL 991
Shure SM 58
Shure SM 58
Sennheiser e845

Any suggestions how i would go about micing a kit with these mics ....

I was going to unscrew the ball off the SM 58's and put one on snare and the other on the kick ...and use the 2 mxl's as overheads ....but where exactly would i put the over heads???

Thanks in advance

Why unscrew the ball from the 58's? You don't need to.

Personally, I would use the 991 as an overhead, from behind the drummer on a boom bring it directly over the drum throne and aim it straight down at the top of the drummer's head (make sure that it is secured so it doesn't fall and knock his brains out...or knock some sense into him - it all depends on the drummer ) or aim it at the drummer's knee (kick drum side). Place the mic about 12" or so above the drummer's head.

Build a tunnel in front of the kick using a chair or two (you could even use a couple of mic boom stands) and hang heavy blankets over it. (I've seen somebody make a frame out of 2" PVC pipe for this) and then stick the 990 in the end of the tunnel to mic the kick drum. The tunnel will "trap" a lot of the kick sound inside, and this helps isolate the kick drum and the kick drum mic so that it helps keep the rest of the kit out of the kick mic

Then for the snare I'd use the 845.

That will give you a good basic rock kit recording provided that the drums are well tuned. Any decent drummer plays dynamically, and this basic set up will give you a fairly natural sound of the kit. Then, for EQ you can just roll off some of the midrange, centered at a frequency that you like. (I tend to like to center my midrange around 700hz to 750hz, and then cut 12 to 15 db's, and that's pretty much it.

The 58's can be used on individual toms, or pairs of them, or even room mic's. Personally, I wouldn't even need them, as I like the sound of the three mic set up I've described. (well, a variation of it - I use 2 kicks, so there's a mic for each kick)

You could also use one 58 right on the mallet strike spot to pick up extra slap, and use the mic in the tunnel for the low end of the kick.


I know, everby will be whining about "this is mono". So what - it sounds good. It's not like you are panning every other drum channel to the hard left
when you normally record stereo tracks. Put a little reverb on it, and on the snare, and most people won't have any idea it's not recorded "in stereo".


It's usually a guitarist who makes this complaint about something not being in stereo - never realizing that they, themselves, are a mono source (unless they have pickups that allow them to pan each individual string independently.) Then never realize that virtually everything Zeppelin released had the drums in mono. (Hell, their first album had the drums recorded with one microphone overhead, pointing straight at Bonzo's kick drum leg - and that's it!)



Tim

[I M Green]

Originally Posted by Tim Brown

Why unscrew the ball from the 58's? You don't need to.

Because that makes it look like the mic we really want. The 57

[lurgan liar]

Yeah ...i read a lot of posts on the forum saying that screwing the ball off the 58 made it more like the 57 ...lol i dunno

[Tim Brown]

Originally Posted by I M Green

Because that makes it look like the mic we really want. The 57

I had a friend who worked at Shure in the 90's (I guess he's still there, but I'm not friends with him anymore. lol) but he told me that the 57 and 58 were almost exactly the same mic, and that the real difference between the two - is the popfilter in the ball.


Tim

[grn]

here's my two cents. i'd put the mxl990 two drum stick lengths above the snare and point directly at the snare, i'd put the mxl991 over the center of the floor tom and point it directly at the center of the snare. then pan those left and right respectively to get the stereo image correct. then i'd mic the snare with an sm58, the kick with an sm58, and the toms with the seinheiser. look up some drum EQ settings online and experiment and if you close mic properly this should give you a very tight drum kit... especially if the room sucks. the overheads will be where you get most of your sound. this is a quick way to setup too.

[grn]

also, you don't have to use the sm58 to mic the toms, you can mic whatever you want to place emphasis on... the hi hat, the other side of the kick, the underside of the snare... whatever.