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Alex W

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We've been recording our band rehearsals on a digital 8-track. With our setup I can get 3 mics on the drum kit. Right now I've got one on the snare, one on the kick, and an overhead. I've played around with the height/position of the overhead some, but was curious if there are any rules of thumb in this regard.

Also, as can be expected, there's significant low frequency, boomy bleed into all the mics. Anyway to combat this short of gobos? I haven't played with equing the individual tracks too much but is that an option without killing the tone of the original recording?

Any thoughts/tips would be much appreciated. We play heavy guitar based rock so it's good and loud in the room overall.

Alex
 
You can pretty safely roll off below 100Hz on your snare and overhead mics without affecting your tone. Might need to to fiddle with the eq around 50-75Hz on the kick to keep your attack but lose the other bassy stuff
 
You need more than 3 mics on the drums. I would say get a mixer. I am using a single ADAT and have 9 mics on the drums. You really need 2 overheads, one for the ride side and one for the high hat side (depending on your set up.. ie. left & right), a kick, and snare. I like to mic the toms as well.
 
Thanks you guys. I'll try the low frequency rolloff and see how it works out.

I've got a 16-channel mixer that I run all the mics through. Problem is I can only track 8 channels at once, and I like the flexibility of being able to mix and eq each of the drum mics separately. Maybe if I get some time at some point I'll experiment with getting a decent submix on the drums.
 
alex, you're hitting the wall that a lot of folks hit when they've got a good sized band (4 or 5 piece or more) and only 8 tracks.

i'd use the mixer to submix all your vocals to one (or two at the most) track to the adat. if you get a "keeper" of one of your tunes, you'll want to re-record vocals anyway.

as for the drums, maybe submix 4 mics (2x OH, snare, kick) or more to a stereo track (2 tracks on the adat), with the OH's panned hard, and kick/snare in the center. sure it doesn't give you the flexibility that 4 tracks would, but assuming your initial submix is well balanced across the kit, it'll give you some pretty good control over the overall level of the drums, come mixdown time.

beyond that, i'm afraid there's not much more i can tell ya other than get another adat. :D if you want that modern drum sound, you're gonna wanna close-mic most of your drums and send each of them to their own track anyway.



wade
 
Awesome you guys and thanks for the link Daryl!

It's pretty limited I know and it's just for getting those moments of genious down on tape (or 1's and 0's as it were).

When we finally piece it all together and I complete my tracking room I'll try and do some real recording with everything isolated. Then I can probably devote 7 tracks to the drums.
 
yep, we've all run into this one time or another. I ended up getting calls from alot of my boys when I got my Roland 880. Same issue...... 8 ins, want a decent mix... gotta limit the mics. About the third try I got pissed and bought a cheap, used Peavey 8 channel power amp. So I was able to mic the bi-jesus out of the drums (into the peavey) and then popped the peavey's main outs into two of the Rolands channels. I suppose technically I lost a little bit of flexibility by submixing like that, but I think that being able to have up to 8 well placed mics in the first place, more than made up for that.

As far as the bleeding and the low end.... no question its a reality, but EQ'ing from the get go will save on that.

I had a friend who was so pissy about bleed that he actually made cute little piezo clip on pickups to snap on the drum shells. Pretty clever all in all. $2.50 each and some finagling with a soldering iron and he had a jumblejam but effective sound.
 
Even,

Do you by any chance have a recording of this piezzo setup? I have yet to hear anything that a piezzo sounds good on, but I'm curious about how drums sound with it.

Oren
 
You can get good result from submixing.

The first time I ever recorded a band live, it was on a Tascam 424 4 track.
The drummer had set up 6 mics on his kit (snare/kick/rack toms/floor toms/2 O/H's) and run that through a mixer.

He spent a week experimenting on the mics and mix (listening on 2trk tape deck) but got it set pretty good.
The stereo drum track came out quite good, considering.

I don't neccessarily think you HAVE to put up more mics....more mics, more bleed given the same set up.....but you gotta really experiment....before rehersal and you have to commit, but sometimes you can make that really work for you....it just requires a lot more set up time.

As far as the original crux of your question.....combatting low end bleed on the drum mics.....I am assuming most of the bleed is comming from the bass amp.

The best way I've found to combat this (besides gobo's) is by having the drummer listen to the whole mix through headphones and turn the amps down and/or move them as far away as possible from the kit.

This way the drummer can hear the guitars and bass (and whatever else) but the amps and such can be away from the drum mics.

Also, how you position the amps in the room with relation to the drum mics and the walls of the room can make a HUGE difference.
Experiment.

Turning down can also allow the band to listen to each other better.....which is not a bad thing....especially in rehersals.


-mike
 
In a perfect world, I use 7 mics on an average kit ( Two overheads, one on rack toms, one on floor tom, kick, snare, and a fill mic out in front of the kit in the room, all to their own track. Now in the olden days of only eight tracks, I put the kick in its own track, the snare in its own track and sub mix the toms and overheads together to a mono track. I then at least had some control at mix time over the drum mix ratio of kick/snare/overhead in context of the whole band mix.
 
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