drum advice?

P

pangalactic

gargling blasters
I'm going to be putting some drums down on Sunday with very limited resources and wondered if you could give me a little advice. The only equipment available to me is an SM57 and an Octava MK-219, both going into a Line 6 Toneport UX2 and then Reaper.

I've been thinking,and the best setup in my mind seems to be the 57 over the drummer's shoulder pointed at the snare,with the Octava out front as a room mic. I'm thinking about 6-10 feet away at about chest height, probably with the -10db rolloff switch in use.

How does this sound? Any better ideas,or suggestions? I'll obviously experiment on the day but it'd be nice to know if I'm thinking along the right lines.
 
pangalactic said:
I'm going to be putting some drums down on Sunday with very limited resources and wondered if you could give me a little advice. The only equipment available to me is an SM57 and an Octava MK-219, both going into a Line 6 Toneport UX2 and then Reaper.

I've been thinking,and the best setup in my mind seems to be the 57 over the drummer's shoulder pointed at the snare,with the Octava out front as a room mic. I'm thinking about 6-10 feet away at about chest height, probably with the -10db rolloff switch in use.

How does this sound? Any better ideas,or suggestions? I'll obviously experiment on the day but it'd be nice to know if I'm thinking along the right lines.
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It depends on the music. If it's hard rock, you're gonna want more focus from the kick and snare. You might wanna forget the concept of a room mic and use the mics to focus on the kick and snare while using their bleed as "overheads". If it's less rambunctious music with more space, then yeah, move em around the room and see what happens.
 
also... regardless of how many mics you use, tune your drums. the best drum sounds will come from the best sounding drums.
 
I would've thought the tuning went without saying :-)

It's punk/hardcore,so I'm definitely going to want the kick and snare to be pretty prominent. I guess my best bet is to just experiment as much as possible!
 
pangalactic said:
I would've thought the tuning went without saying :-)

It's punk/hardcore,so I'm definitely going to want the kick and snare to be pretty prominent. I guess my best bet is to just experiment as much as possible!
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Your best bet would be to use more mics. If you wanna make really good recordings, 2 mics just aint enough for loud, fast, aggressive music.
 
Personally, I'd start with the Octava over the drummer's head, pointed at the snare, as low as it can be without getting in the way, and the 57 on the kick somewhere. Tell the basher to take it easy on the brass.
 
Greg_L said:
Your best bet would be to use more mics. If you wanna make really good recordings, 2 mics just aint enough for loud, fast, aggressive music.
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Agreed. Also, if you're lookin on the cheap, I'm actually really pleased with the ES57s from speakerrepair.com. They're supposed to be an SM57 knockoff, but I think they actually sound better than a 57 on toms. You'll also want a decent pair of small diaphragm condenser mics for overheads and a dedicated kick drum mic.

If you just want to do quick and dirty, I'd start where Ehr said.

btw, I also do mostly punk rock and Gerg does too...
 
Here's some info on 3 mic technique:
http://www.mercenary.com/3micdrumstuf.html The info he gives about the FOK (front of kick) mic is good.


The main things, as stated before, are kick and snare. You might get some stereo effect by panning the kick a hair right and the snare a hair left.
 
Thanks everybody.

At the moment using more than two mics just isn't an option. As cheap as some mics are, they're still more than I can afford. Combine that with the fact that my interface only accepts two inputs and you'll see my problem. I will upgrade, but it won't be any time soon.

Thanks for the link to the 3 mic technique. While I can't use the technique talked about the principles involved are very useful. I'll play around with versions of the recorderman technique as well, just to see what kind of sounds I can get.

Does anybody have any idea how much abuse the Octava is going to be able to take? I've only ever really used dynamic mics that seem to be indestructable. I'm a little worried about breaking a condenser if I don't fully know what I'm doing with it.
 
Probably the 3rd time I've posted this (sorry):



If the player and drums are good, it should sound great with 1 mic, and even better with 2.

Even if you had unlimited mics, if it doesn't sound good with 1 mic there's something wrong. It should sound killer with only 1 mic.
 
Greg_L said:
Don't spread that kind of misinformation.
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In the interests of learning as much as possible, why is that misinformation?

And in dintymoore's defence, he was one of the few people who didn't just tell me to "buy more mics" - which doesn't help me at all.
 
Greg_L said:
Don't spread that kind of misinformation.
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Well, "killer" might be going a bit to far... :(

Mono drums do sound bland, there's no way around it.

Lets' say... even with just 1 mic it should sound like a good drummer playing good drums.
 
pangalactic said:
... why is that misinformation?
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because its unfortunately not true. Sure, you can record with 2 mics and with some practice, trial and error you can probably get something that sounds ok (maybe even really good), but in reality, not micing the entire kit is going to be a compromise, especially for your type of music. Micing each drum will give you the flexibility to tweak and mix as you go and give you the ability to make adjustments to individual drums (i.e, compressor, eq and verb on a snare) without affecting the rest of teh kit. If you listen to the drums on the video Dinty posted, they do sound pretty good... the problem is, when you start to layer all your other instruments and vocals and everything, you'll almost inevitably wishing you could tweak the snare or get some more thump from the kick, or back the cymbals off but keep the drums up... more mics, to me, is alot about having more control when its time to mix.


pangalactic said:
And in dintymoore's defence, he was one of the few people who didn't just tell me to "buy more mics" - which doesn't help me at all.
Click to expand...
in fairness, he did post up the three mic technique, and you said you only had 2 mics. :D:p
 
I've gotten some pretty great drum recordings with only two mics. I recommend putting one mic near the floor tom, pointing at the snare. Put the other mic as an overhead pretty much in the middle of the kit (depending on where your cymbals are. You don't want to override the mic with cymbals.)
 
Another thought is that we only have two ears and with that in mind, if you get a good sound in the room you should be able to capture that sound with two mics, just like our ears do.

And the final mix will only be two tracks.

Multi mic'ing drums is more for being able to tweak the individual instruments with panning, eq, etc and for sure that's the best way to go. Four mics is really the "normal" minimum.

But the main focus should always be on the song, and all kinds of things can work.
 
Jeff_D said:
in fairness, he did post up the three mic technique, and you said you only had 2 mics. :D:p
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He did indeed haha! I hope that comment didn't come across as ungrateful, because I'm anything but... Any help people can give me can only be a good thing, even if it's telling me to buy more shit so my recordings don't suck ;-)

We'll see how it comes out on the day. The kit sounds pretty damn good in the room anyway (I got all that set up last week but didn't get a chance to record) so fingers crossed I'll get some good results!
 
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