cavedog101
Well-known member
I used to record rehearsals with a couple of SM57's into a cassette recorder and a small mixer. If you pay attention to the input gain and properly balance it with whats going on in the room, there's no reason at all not to get recordings that will tell you what is going on with the band.
But that doesn't really answer your question about whether this mic you have would make a good room mic for recording drums......So here's a take on that. First..I record a lot of drums and have for many years. In bad basements, quality studios, home built rooms, outside at a festival, on a back porch, under an awning, in a garage with the door open and the door closed etc etc etc...
For a "room" mic to be an effective use of a separate track, the room needs to have some quality to it. There can't be a bunch of comb filtering going on, there can't be a standing wave at some set frequency, there can't be an uncontrollable slap echo......That being said, a condenser with the ability to to have several patterns can be useful. THAT being said, a recordist has to know what things sound like in their room at different spots. You do this by spending the time with someone playing the instrument you want to add a "room" sound to, and moving the mic while listening to it. If you have a control room , and an apprentice, and a second person to play stuff, this is an easy thing to do. If you are recording in the same room as the instrument (drums) are housed in, it's not easy at all. No matter how much help you have. You simply won't be able to isolate your ears in a way that the only thing you hear will be the instrument being played through said mic at different locations.
But wait! There's more! Getting things to sound good requires work and sometimes it's 'work-around-problems' work.
This where it gets to be fun. Trying all sorts of things. If you find you're alone in trying to experiment on stuff because your band is more interested in other things, you will do well to recruit someone else to help. But it is easier with help.
I get good "room" sounds sometimes by leaving open a door to the drum area and putting the mic in a hallway. Sometimes the adjacent bathroom has the perfect ambience for a track. In cases like this it makes very little difference in the type of mic you use but makes a HUGE difference in the quality of the mic preamp and the converters since you're asking for them to reproduce information that will be lacking in presence and gain at the source.You have to be able to add gain without noise in oreder for this to work as well as you'd like. Adding a track with a bunch of noise floor isn't really adding anything at all.
But that doesn't really answer your question about whether this mic you have would make a good room mic for recording drums......So here's a take on that. First..I record a lot of drums and have for many years. In bad basements, quality studios, home built rooms, outside at a festival, on a back porch, under an awning, in a garage with the door open and the door closed etc etc etc...
For a "room" mic to be an effective use of a separate track, the room needs to have some quality to it. There can't be a bunch of comb filtering going on, there can't be a standing wave at some set frequency, there can't be an uncontrollable slap echo......That being said, a condenser with the ability to to have several patterns can be useful. THAT being said, a recordist has to know what things sound like in their room at different spots. You do this by spending the time with someone playing the instrument you want to add a "room" sound to, and moving the mic while listening to it. If you have a control room , and an apprentice, and a second person to play stuff, this is an easy thing to do. If you are recording in the same room as the instrument (drums) are housed in, it's not easy at all. No matter how much help you have. You simply won't be able to isolate your ears in a way that the only thing you hear will be the instrument being played through said mic at different locations.
But wait! There's more! Getting things to sound good requires work and sometimes it's 'work-around-problems' work.
This where it gets to be fun. Trying all sorts of things. If you find you're alone in trying to experiment on stuff because your band is more interested in other things, you will do well to recruit someone else to help. But it is easier with help.
I get good "room" sounds sometimes by leaving open a door to the drum area and putting the mic in a hallway. Sometimes the adjacent bathroom has the perfect ambience for a track. In cases like this it makes very little difference in the type of mic you use but makes a HUGE difference in the quality of the mic preamp and the converters since you're asking for them to reproduce information that will be lacking in presence and gain at the source.You have to be able to add gain without noise in oreder for this to work as well as you'd like. Adding a track with a bunch of noise floor isn't really adding anything at all.
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