A question for people with a lot of drum tracking experience...

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Dark Imagery

Dark Imagery

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I've discovered after a previous question I posted that I hit my cymbals hard as hell. I'm wanting to use my condensers as cymbal mics but I don't want to hurt them. I have a sound level meter but it's ancient and it's hard for me to hold that over a cymbal, smash the cymbal, and try to read the meter. Could anyone with experience tracking loud drummers tell me roughly the average SPL they're getting with cymbal mics about a foot and a half above the cymbals? The mics I'm using have a 130 db limit. Thanks guys!
 
I don't think you're going to get anywhere near hurting the mics.
You might get some distortion.
I'm pretty sure that max spl measures the place where the mic distorts.
That's not necessarily the place where you're going to hurt your mic.
Your condensers can handle working as overheads.
Don't worry about it.

the place you're most likely to hurt them is somewhere where you are getting sustained super high spl or constant bursts of level above your mic's max spl.
In front of the hole in the front head of a kick drum (where the sound pressure might not even be the problem so much as the big burst of air coming out of the hole pushing the diaphragm farther than it wants to go) or right in front of a big ass guitar amp that's turned up to eleven and loud enough to hurt your ears would be good candidates.
You'd definitely hear the mic distorting in those situations, though, so chances are you'd pick something else.
Honestly, I feel like you'd actually have to work pretty hard to damage any modern mics with just high spl.
You can look up a db comparison chart to assuage your fears but, chances are you aren't playing louder than a pneumatic riveter, and that sucker is only 125db.
Which is all to say, once again, don't worry about it, and bash your heart out!:D:spank::D

PS, some of that might be me talking out of my ass based on stuff I think I remember hearing when I was drunk or something, so if anybody knows I'm wrong, please do correct me and call me stupid.
 
The Cancers said:
I don't think you're going to get anywhere near hurting the mics.
You might get some distortion.
I'm pretty sure that max spl measures the place where the mic distorts.
That's not necessarily the place where you're going to hurt your mic.
Your condensers can handle working as overheads.
Don't worry about it.

the place you're most likely to hurt them is somewhere where you are getting sustained super high spl or constant bursts of level above your mic's max spl.
In front of the hole in the front head of a kick drum (where the sound pressure might not even be the problem so much as the big burst of air coming out of the hole pushing the diaphragm farther than it wants to go) or right in front of a big ass guitar amp that's turned up to eleven and loud enough to hurt your ears would be good candidates.
You'd definitely hear the mic distorting in those situations, though, so chances are you'd pick something else.
Honestly, I feel like you'd actually have to work pretty hard to damage any modern mics with just high spl.
You can look up a db comparison chart to assuage your fears but, chances are you aren't playing louder than a pneumatic riveter, and that sucker is only 125db.
Which is all to say, once again, don't worry about it, and bash your heart out!:D:spank::D

PS, some of that might be me talking out of my ass based on stuff I think I remember hearing when I was drunk or something, so if anybody knows I'm wrong, please do correct me and call me stupid.
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i have nothing constructive to add to this post except that i am very happy you used the word "assuage." kudos to you.
 
Ha! Ah good, cause I was gonna close mic a jet engine and tornado for my next album. But seriously, great response and thanks. Makes feel better knowing I can concentrate on the sound I want without worrying about the mics.
 
Dark Imagery said:
I've discovered after a previous question I posted that I hit my cymbals hard as hell. I'm wanting to use my condensers as cymbal mics but I don't want to hurt them. I have a sound level meter but it's ancient and it's hard for me to hold that over a cymbal, smash the cymbal, and try to read the meter. Could anyone with experience tracking loud drummers tell me roughly the average SPL they're getting with cymbal mics about a foot and a half above the cymbals? The mics I'm using have a 130 db limit. Thanks guys!
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Are you talking about live or studio? Why would you want to use cymbal mics at all, let alone if you hit them really hard??? Are you also using overheads? Overheads, rather than "cymbal mics", is what you should be doing if we're talking about studio recording.
 
RAMI said:
Are you talking about live or studio? Why would you want to use cymbal mics at all, let alone if you hit them really hard??? Are you also using overheads? Overheads, rather than "cymbal mics", is what you should be doing if we're talking about studio recording.
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Well, I was calling them cymbal mics because I'm concentrating the mics on the cymbals rather than the whole kit, while close micing everything else. I play with a lot of dynamics on the cymbals, but they can get loud. I want to capture everything about them while having the best volume control I can.

This link is great, Dodge, thanks.
 
Dark Imagery said:
Well, I was calling them cymbal mics because I'm concentrating the mics on the cymbals rather than the whole kit,
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In that case, they ARE cymbal mics. I still say it's a huge mistake to treat those mics as "cymbal mics" as opposed to using them for the whole kit and just using close mics for everything else. You should be capturing a stereo image of the WHOLE kit with your overheads. Don't worry about the cymbals. I've never heard of someone not being able to pick up cymbals with overheads, and you say you hit yours hard, so you won't have a problem.
 
Hopefully I'm not making an ass out of everybody involved, but I'm gonna assume from his name that the OP is a metal guy in which case there's a good chance that the sound of the drums in the room is not necessarily the sound he's trying to capture. There might be a good bit of triggering/replacement potentially involved, he might be going for some weird chopped up disconnected drum sounds, never know.
I agree with you that the best sound of the drumkit in the room is gonna come from getting the majority of your cymbal sound from the overheads recording the entire kit, but it's not the only way to do it.
 
You certainly can go with cymbal mics. I've seen guys get good results from strange setups like mics fastened to the cymbal stands pointing straight up about 2 inches under each cymbal. You don't HAVE to go with "whole drum kit" overheads.

The thing is, techniques that ditch the overheads in favor of cymbal mics are tricky to get right. Phase can be a problem. You really have to know how to deal with harsh highs. And it's a bugger to get a full large spacious drum sound out of a drum's close mic alone.

In other words, if I were you I'd build up some real microphone/recording confidence before getting tricky like that.

Dark Imagery said:
I play with a lot of dynamics on the cymbals, but they can get loud. I want to capture everything about them while having the best volume control I can.
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Don't look to the faders on your mix desk to control the individual volumes of elements in your drum kit. Yeah, if one drum is a little quiet you can bump it up with the close mic. But if something is just buried... It's never going to sound right.

As the drummer, you control the volume when you play. Loud cymbals are great and all. You just have to hammer loudness into the drum skins as well when you're bringin' the noise.
 
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The Cancers said:
Hopefully I'm not making an ass out of everybody involved, but I'm gonna assume from his name that the OP is a metal guy in which case there's a good chance that the sound of the drums in the room is not necessarily the sound he's trying to capture. There might be a good bit of triggering/replacement potentially involved, he might be going for some weird chopped up disconnected drum sounds, never know.
I agree with you that the best sound of the drumkit in the room is gonna come from getting the majority of your cymbal sound from the overheads recording the entire kit, but it's not the only way to do it.
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I don't disagree with that. But, even a metal drum sound should sound cohesive. Like Chibi said, only micing individual drums not only can be tricky, it requires a lot of attention to phase cancellation, etc... and the more mics you use, the more complicated it gets. If you're just triggering everything anyway, then what's the point of this thread? Just trigger away and turn down the cymbals if they're too loud, etc.
 
Dark Imagery said:
Could anyone with experience tracking loud drummers tell me roughly the average SPL they're getting with cymbal mics about a foot and a half above the cymbals? The mics I'm using have a 130 db limit. Thanks guys!
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Honestly, that might even be undesirably close even for cymbal spot mics. The general rule of thumb is anything mic'd at a distance equal to the vibrational surface of an instrument or less (i.e - the top of a guitar, the diameter of a cymbal) is in the "near field" and will be very subject to mic position for the sound the mic is picking up, and anything farther back is in the "far field," and will be more balanced. I'mn speculating your crash and ride cymbals are more than 18" across, so by positioning a mic that close you're probably getting a very narrow, selective, "filtered" sort of representation of the cymbal, which may not be desirable even for metal (unless, again, you're planning on triggering everything).

I'm not much of a drum expert, so one of the guys who knows what they're talking about feel free to tell me I'm full of it. :D
 
Ok to clear everything up:

1. F**k some triggers.

2. Was just wondering if it'd be easier to manage the mix if I had more control over the cymbals' volume.

3. I totally agree with using overheads on the whole kit to capture it as a single stereo instrument. I'm just kinda going back and forth in my head trying to decide the best way to mic the drums before I start tracking this project. After a year of songwriting I want everything as good as it can be with my equipment.

The responses in this thread have brought up great points: If I choose cymbal mics in place of overheads I would miss a lot of the drum's sound as an instrument and lose a lot of its placement in the stereo image. Two things I don't want to do. Probably the best point brought up is this: Drewpeterson7: I'mn speculating your crash and ride cymbals are more than 18" across, so by positioning a mic that close you're probably getting a very narrow, selective, "filtered" sort of representation of the cymbal. Definitely don't want that and I hadn't even thought of that, thanks!

So I don't wanna just keep going in circles in this thread. I've pretty much made up my mind to use overheads instead of cymbal mics. Originally I was just worried about hurting mics with the spls.

@ the Cancers: I like a LOT of different music but yes, this is a black metal album. I want it to be raw but CLEAR and clean (unlike a majority of black metal albums mixes). And I definitley don't want the overprocessed death metal sound. Don't get me wrong I love death metal.
 
Go read this thread, by the way - it's way more than you ever want to know about mics:

https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=27030

That said... The "metal" drum sound really isn't a very natural picture of "the drum's sound as an instrument" and generally has a very exaggerated stereo image. Also,triggering is pretty widespread - even when a drum track is largely acoustic, it's pretty common to still trigger the kick for an exaggerated "machine gun" evenness on double bass stuff.

That doesn't mean you HAVE to do it this way, but if you're going against the grain for metal production, it should be for an artistic reason and you should know why.
 
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