16 Tracks of drums!

C

chamelious

www.thesunexplodes.com
My band have just finished recording our second album. For the first time ever, i've handed it over to someone else to mix. At the mixing engineers request we ended up using 16 mics on drums! I thought it was pretty cool. Below is a video we made as a teaser, obviously its unmixed, this is mostly just the mics raw, panned, with the exception of the snare top mic which has a bit of eq/comp on it.



Theres a mic on every cymbal, a mono overhead, 2 mics on every shell, and 2 room mics. We recorded in our local venues main live room, and the room mics just sound awesome. Just thought i'd share this with you guys :)
 
Funnilly enough, earlier on I was wondering what had become of Chamelious when I was looking at the thread of the guy whose stuff didn't arrive in whole form from ZZZsounds.
 
Mic'ing every cymbal, imo, shows the inability to properly mic drum oh's. Why would you mic a crash or china? I can see for metal, to want to mic the ride or hats, so it can be featured, but woah. The 2 mics per shell thing too...I know some guys do it, and I can see that being the case for snare or kick (I am guilty as of late), but when the toms are tuned all dead and muffled like these, there is little merit for 2 mics per tom, again...imo. Ah well, I guess they don't need to use them in the mix. Mono OH to me is odd though. I know some dudes like it, but I feel having all that cymbal metal in the center of the track just interferes with other key things you have centered, like a lead vocal, or a lead guitar part. It also smears the stereo image if you want to pan your toms. No sense forcing a stereo pan if it doesn't sound natural.
 
Sounds good. So if that's due to the fact that 16 tracks were used, great. Perhaps only 6 tracks were used in this mix. Maybe the mix engineer figured if there were that many tracks recorded, he could certainly find 6-8 that were usable.
 
I find the quality of the kit and playing to be inversely proportional to the number of mics needed to get a good drum sound. With a good kit played well I just need kick, snare and overheads, and I might not even use the snare mic. One of the best drum sounds I've gotten was with a M-S setup about 3' out from the kick and about 4' off the floor, and the mid mic alone sounded fantastic.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
I find the quality of the kit and playing to be inversely proportional to the number of mics needed to get a good drum sound. With a good kit played well I just need kick, snare and overheads, and I might not even use the snare mic. One of the best drum sounds I've gotten was with a M-S setup about 3' out from the kick and about 4' off the floor, and the mid mic alone sounded fantastic.
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Perhaps, but I remember thinking that and I used 12 mics on a crappy kit. I really just ended up tossing out many junk tracks as they sounded too horrible.
 
CrowsofFritz said:
Perhaps, but I remember thinking that and I used 12 mics on a crappy kit. I really just ended up tossing out many junk tracks as they sounded too horrible.
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On a crappy kit, and/or with bad playing, I find the need to deconstruct the drums, process them to death and reconstruct them into something resembling a decent sounding kit requires putting mics on each element. Different problems with each element require different processing to fix, which requires minimal bleed, which requires many close mics. Trying to make bad drums sound good is probably one of my least favorite recording/mixing tasks.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
On a crappy kit, and/or with bad playing, I find the need to deconstruct the drums, process them to death and reconstruct them into something resembling a decent sounding kit requires putting mics on each element. Different problems with each element require different processing to fix, which requires minimal bleed, which requires many close mics. Trying to make bad drums sound good is probably one of my least favorite recording/mixing tasks.
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But to be fair there are genres, especially certain types of metal, in which this is standard procedure regardless of the actual sound of the drums.
 
snus said:
How do you know? Were you there also recording that drummer in that room with just 9 mics and have that for comparison?
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jesus, you just wanna try to attack me at any chance you get huh?

but i know i could get equal or better results in that room with 9 mics. call my confidence arrogance if you must, but that gave me no notion of "hmm maybe i should use more mics" ... 2 carefully placed OH's and 1 well placed "room mic" (wouldnt really want it too far away in a shitty room) would give me everything i need... aside from that i'd close mic just like they did.
 
CMB Studios said:
jesus, you just wanna try to attack me at any chance you get huh?

but i know i could get equal or better results in that room with 9 mics. call my confidence arrogance if you must, but that gave me no notion of "hmm maybe i should use more mics" ... 2 carefully placed OH's and 1 well placed "room mic" (wouldnt really want it too far away in a shitty room) would give me everything i need... aside from that i'd close mic just like they did.
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Ignorance is as ignorance does. ;)
 
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