Well, there's Djembe, and there's DJEMBE. It depends a little on the drum, and a lot on the player. I made an album with Jeff Webb of Eastwind percussion, the lead Djembe player of a West African drum ensemble, and one of the only Americans that the Africans take seriously. Oh my God! The Djembe is the lead guitar equivalent of an African drum group, and as such, it has to cut through a lot of drums. If the player is good, he'll be half deaf, and have hands like shoe soles.
You've heard of talking drums, which can be used to communicate at 12 miles on a clear day? That's what they're talking about. There are lots of Americans who mess around with a little thing that sort of looks like a Djembe, and you can treat that as a conga. Put an SM57 on the skin, and you are good to go. But if it's the real thing, look out. Jeff has blown the heads off of a couple of FOH engineers that thought it was a conga, and wouldn't listen to him. I assure you, they didn't listen to *anything* afterwards.
I was smart. Before I started mic'ing the thing up, I said, "OK Let's hear the slap." It didn't take more than 3 seconds of that before I put him in a vocal booth. I heard the slap bounce off the walls of my live room 5 times! So- First, get this thing in the deadest acoustic space you have. Next, the technique of playing the thing uses the skin in various distances from the rim for tone shifting, and the center of the skin for boom, like a kick drum. Your idea of using 2 mics is spot on. You pretty much have to. Use whatever you would use for an
acoustic guitar on the skin, *PADDED*, and use whatever you would use for a kick drum on the throat. Reverse the phase on one mic in tracking, not mixdown, or you'll get phase distortion in the cans.
We had our best luck with a C414B-ULS, padded, on the skin, and a D112 on the throat. The room was key. The ceiling above that monster was 2 feet of compressed fiberglass covered with auralex foam. We took out the drum platform and left a carpeted floor over concrete. I'm not kidding. When he plays with a band, they put 6 mics on the trap set, and move Jeff away from the drummer so the drummer can hear his own drums with headphones on. When tracking in the studio, we pretty much do his headphone mix with everybody but him cranked (half deaf, like I said- he's been playing that thing for 20 years in the center of a drum team). I don't even feed his drums to the cans. A pair of Sennhisers attenuates his drum 32db, which is just enough that he can hear the other guys in the cans!
In conclusion, if you got some kid who bought a small "djembe" at Guitar Center, you can ignore most of what I have said. If the player's name involves "Bara" or Baba", and he is a real West African Djembe player, prepare yourself for the loudest musical instrument in the world. A master player can tone it down to not blow your head off, but he hates it, because he knows he's losing tone to get it, like turning down a Marshall stack. If you have the room that can control the thing, you will have made an African friend for life. Start with the gain way down, and the headphones on, or 3 minutes into the session, you won't be able to hear enough to mix. And be prepared to give the player a custom headphone mix. Remember, you heard it here first.-Richie
