Help Recording Drums

S

showstone

New member
Ok, I originally posted this in the 'recording techniques forum and got no replies...so I will try here.

A question regarding recording drums...first should tell you that I am EXTREMELY new to recording.

I am wondering about getting a huge drum sound....think "Levee Breaks" but more "in your face" and not so distant sounding.

current setup:
mackie 1604 - motu 1224 - daw(cool edit pro)

I am miking snare and all toms with 57's, audix d6 on the kick, superlux pencil condenser on the hi hat, and (2) akg perception 100's for overheads.

If needed I can go into specifics about my mic placement and any other things you need to know to get a better idea of set up.

If I were to use (2) more akg 100's at a distance say 10-12 feet away and 6 feet off the ground...do i need to reverse the phase of the distant miced drums?

My intention is to blend the "room sound" mics with the close mics to get a large over the top sound.



Any other suggestions would be helpful.
 
Sounds like you've got the right gear to get this done. You'll probably ultimately find that a hi-hat mic isn't necessary for what the overheads and the rest of the mics will pick up in inherent bleed-through.

My only suggestion to you would be to get your overheads sounding great first, then mix in your close snare mic, then bass drum and everything else after that.

As far as phasing problems, read this thread and you'll get more out of it than any potential misinformation I'll be spewing. Minor phasing problems can be minimized by doing what you're going to be doing (recording your tracks seperately) and when I run into it, I can usually overcome it by simply re-aligning the tracks (zooming in hardcore on the waveform) to make the wavforms more closely match each other. Anywho, read on this thread about it if you want to know more.
http://www.homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=174861&highlight=phase+cancellation

Also if you want that particular "Levee" sound, you either HAVE to have a very wet, verby room or a convincing verb plugin to accomplish this (think shower-stall type reverb). You can't beat sound of a real room though IMO.

If I recall correctly, all Bonham used to get that sound on top of the close miking was a distance mic at the top of a flight of stairs at some castle with him playing at the bottom of the stairs or something of the sort.

Here's a pic of a BBC session so it'll give you a hint of his close-up mic placement.
http://www.cathedralstone.net/Pics/LedZeppelin2.jpg

And another:
http://www.angel.dk/zeppelin/Media/CD2store/ZepD_16A.JPG
 
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