drum advice?

I posted that link more for the FOK mic details, I think most people would agree that you do ultimately want two overheads and mics on the kick and snare (4 mics).

I wouldn't get too hung up on it though, the big picture should always be on the musical performance and the song itself. :)
 
Jeff_D said:
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.
Click to expand...

This ^^^^^^^^^ x1000000000000000000000000000000

I'm pretty sick of the ancient purist "you should get perfect drums with one mic" mantra. Keep in mind that this dude wants to do punk/hardcore. THE DRUMS AINT GONNA SOUND WORTH A SHIT WITH ONE MIC. If you're trying to re-create Elvis's sun recordings, then yeah, use one mic. If you want big, powerful drums that stand out with clarity while being surrounded by walls of overdriven guitars, then you're gonna need more than 2 mics.
 
I'd be interested to know if any studio anywhere has, as a regular practice, recorded drums with just one mic since the mid 60s.
Sometimes, it's worth remembering that what we nostalgically view as the best way to do certain things recording wise {and I love many of those old techniques and ideas so I'm not knocking them} wasn't seen in that light at the time. Some say things like 'analog is the pure sound, the best sound' but don't forget, when that's all there was, lots of people didn't feel that way. They looked towards clinically cleaning up the then current sounds and digital is a direct result of the dissatisfaction. And so it is with recording instruments, notably drums. Lots of musicians simply were not happy with one mic on a drum. Hence, as the track count on machines got higher, running parallel to this was miking each component on a drumkit and feeding them their own track. There's a reason for that.

Personally, I've stopped thinking of any instrument on it's own. I think of them in relation to everything else that's going to be going on. Or as Jeff D often calls it, 'the dense rock mix' {regardless of the genre, the principle remains}.
 
dintymoore said:
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.
Click to expand...

Not true.

God made our ears better than we've ever made a mic. Our ears are far more sensitive to proximity effect, sense of depth & space, and a billion tiny little nuances than is any microphone--especially up close!

When I stand 8 feet in front of my kit when a drummers playing, I hear a powerful ruckus! My chest vibrates. I can put two of my best microphones in the same exact spot, and while it sounds "okay" it doesn't sound anything like what my ears just heard. Because the mics aren't nearly as good as my ears.

So when I record a kit with 8 or 10 mics, carefully compressing, EQing, panning, and leveling each and every one--I'm not trying to come up with something better than my ears can hear; I'm simply trying to recreate what my ears hear--and that's only possible with that kind of control.

This all assumes close proximity. If I wanted to duplicate the sound of a kit from 100 feet away--yeah, I could do that with two mics. But I want my drums to sound like they're in my car with me!

EDIT: Put another way: It's the same thing we do when we double track guitars, or record a piano with mics spread way out--because our ears are so superior to microphones, we exaggerate how we use those mics just to end up back at something that sounds convincing to our ears.
 
WhiteStrat said:
Not true.

God made our ears better than we've ever made a mic. Our ears are far more sensitive to proximity effect, sense of depth & space, and a billion tiny little nuances than is any microphone--especially up close!

When I stand 8 feet in front of my kit when a drummers playing, I hear a powerful ruckus! My chest vibrates. I can put two of my best microphones in the same exact spot, and while it sounds "okay" it doesn't sound anything like what my ears just heard. Because the mics aren't nearly as good as my ears.

So when I record a kit with 8 or 10 mics, carefully compressing, EQing, panning, and leveling each and every one--I'm not trying to come up with something better than my ears can hear; I'm simply trying to recreate what my ears hear--and that's only possible with that kind of control.

This all assumes close proximity. If I wanted to duplicate the sound of a kit from 100 feet away--yeah, I could do that with two mics. But I want my drums to sound like they're in my car with me!

EDIT: Put another way: It's the same thing we do when we double track guitars, or record a piano with mics spread way out--because our ears are so superior to microphones, we exaggerate how we use those mics just to end up back at something that sounds convincing to our ears.
Click to expand...

Maybe in the near future with all the new breakthroughs in science ... and human cloning and stem cell research becomes the norm ... we'll be able to directly hardwire those ears into an interface and capture what we're hearing with them.


Didn't they grow a human ear on a mouse?! We're halfway there!
 
mcmetal said:
Maybe in the near future with all the new breakthroughs in science ... and human cloning and stem cell research becomes the norm ... we'll be able to directly hardwire those ears into an interface and capture what we're hearing with them.


Didn't they grow a human ear on a mouse?! We're halfway there!
Click to expand...

I think the hard part will be grafting the nerve endings to ADAT!
 
Last edited:
The drumkit is a unique instrument in the sense that unlike virtually all others, there are multiple sound generating components. In order to catch all the nuances of a drummer's playing, it makes sense to multi mic. For some songs and some forms of music, one or two mics can suffice {you can shove the drums loud in the mix !} and you can get something 'usable'. One gets to a point however, where 'usable' is a second class citizen. You want to maximise the beast at your disposal ! Even jazz producers tend to use at least 3 mics
That all said, there are a couple of instructionals that might be of interest to you in your immediate situation. Call it food for thought.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top