mic info???

[mndog75]

I am not a drummer but am interested in how to record them, heres what I dont understand, if you have enough tracks of course you would want to mic every piece you can so you will have full mixing on the whole set, but heres what I dont understand, if you mic everything wont all mics pick up on everything else as well as whatever your micing??? so when you listen to track one for example and you want to add some eq to your highhat wouldnt you here the rest of the set as well???please explain how that works, I would just think everything would be together as if just one mic anyway???

 

[Richard Monroe]

Yo MNdog! You have hit on one of the things almost nobody agrees upon, so I can only give you my take on it. First, the sound of the entire kit is picked up by the overheads, which are critical to the sound. Other mics are used to augment or accent the sound of certain parts of the kit, particularly kick and snare. There is a current trend to stick a mic on everything in sight, mostly because we have more tracks than we used to. ALbums used to be made on 8 tracks! Hell, today, you can't fit the drums on 8 tracks.
Moreover, this trend has *not* resulted in better sound. Half the AE's I know put a mic on the high hat just to give the drummer a warm fuzzy feeling, and don't even use it. Of course mics do pick up bleed from the rest of the kit, which is OK, as a rule. In general, I would say- get your overheads right by themselves, then add kick and snare, maybe one mic on the floor tom and one or two on the rack toms, and stop. If you can get the overheads to sound good all by themselves, you are winning. Then mix in kick and snare until it sounds better. Get something hard under the drummer, or the kick and snare are liable to get sucked up by a carpeted floor.