Drums, Here We Go.
This is gonna be a pretty big addition, so I'll break it up into several sections. Obviously, recording drums depends on a lot of different elements; the actual drums used, the drummer, the room, the style of music, the mics available, mic placement, number of tracks available, stereo or mono, and how important the drums are to the particular song. Let's look at each of the above elements in a little more detail (although I'm gonna go into a "lot of detail" about kick and snare right now):
The Drums
Bad drums will never sound great. The drums hafta be in good shape, tuned correctly, and properly set up.If they sound bad in the room, they'll probably sound bad on tape. A good engineer sometimes has to be a good intrument tech. I've had to tune drums many times, intonate guitars and basses, rewire pickups, etc. Just because the drummer knows how to play drums is no guarantee that he/she can tune them.
Every drum has a natural resonance. You can hear the note by lightly tapping on the side of the drum. That's usually what you tune the top head to, with the bottom head tuned a little lower. There's a range of about 2 or so notes each way from that natural resonant frequency that will work fine, but you need to stay in that range to get the power out of the drum. Drums are usually tuned in fourths, starting with the high tom. If you're not knowledgable about drum tuning, it would be well worth it to have a good drummer come in one time and show you how to tune drums.
I'll get into drum tuning in another post if anybody's interested in that, but right now, just make sure the drums are tuned correctly, and they sound good in the room. We usually use Ambassador coated heads for our drums and they record very well. We avoid the oil-filled heads (too dead-sounding), and we stick with the single ply, coated top heads for everything, with clear heads on the bottom.
The Kick Drum
The kick, along with the snare and electric bass, is usually the backbone of the song - these instruments provide the "groove" and "drive" of most rock music, and they require the greatest attention. For rock, especially metal, the kick also provides another element - the beater "click", needed to hear the speed or complexity of the bass drum patterns.
Most rock drummers have a hole cut in the front head (the head facing the audience), but few drummers understand the hole's function. Most do it for looks, because "all the other drummers do it".
The hole is for mic access to the back drum head (the head being hit by the foot pedal), to let the mic get close enough to pick up more of the beater "click". The hole should be 4 to 6" in diameter, and located above the center line, to make it easy to get the mic (mounted on a short stand and boom arm) inside the drum.
I usually have the drummer loosen and turn the head till the hole is in the upper right quadrant, and I'll bring the mic in, angled toward the floor tom, about 3 to 4" away from where the beater hits the head. Angling the mic towards the floor tom reduces the amount of snare bleed, which will help later on if I need to gate the kick drum.
For drums without the access port, I'll also try miking the kick from the pedal side of the drum. If I need a really "huge" sounding kick, I'll construct a tunnel from a packing blanket off the ported head and add a large condenser or ribbon mic about 3 to 4 feet away (inside the "tunnel"), just to pick up the low end. I've even made a "tunnel" by removing the front head entirely and placing a second kick drum in front of the first (removing the back head from the second kick, and miking the second kick at the hole.
I avoid gating or compressing the kick during the recording stage, but I might do it during the mix. I usually add a few dB of boost between 2 and 4 kHz to emphasize the beater click. I'll crank the boost all the way up, and then sweep till I find the desired click sound, then back off on the boost. For tape based systems, this should be standard procedure, since boosting top end later on will also add hiss.
I'll scoop out a big hole down low, using a parametric, anywhere from 250 to about 800 Hz, eleminating the "boom" frequencies. I don't usually add any low bottom boost during recording, since it's easy to add later during mixdown.
The Mics For Kick Drums
For rock drums, the mic choices are usually: AKG D-112 (older recordings use
the AKG D-12E),
ElectroVoice RE-20,
AudioTechnica ATM-25, Sennheiser 421, Shure Beta 52, and the new Sennheiser 602. These are all dynamic mics, either cardioid or hypercardioid, and pretty large diaphragms. The Shure SM-57 is also used for kick, and will work ok, but not usually as well as the mics listed above.
Mics for use in a kick tunnel or for distant kick miking are usually either large diaphragm condensers (
the Neumann U-47fet is the most popular choice), or ribbon mics like the Royer 121, the RCA 44BX, or
the Coles 4038 - all high dollar mics. Some good low-cost choices would be the Marshall V67G and the Studio Projects C1.
That should do it for a while. I'll continue the rest of this a little later.