Hardest to mic?

[drossfile]

Under $100 I would go with an SM-57, a GLS ES-57 (1/3 the price) or a condenser like the SP B1.

I will tell you what I think are the most important lessons I have learned in micing a kit.

1. Let the drums be drums. Do NOT try to make them sound like a recording before you mic them. Let them speak in the most natural way they can. Just the same as they were right out of the box. Tune them well, then after that leave them alone. Seriously. Don't try to weigh them down and dampen the sound with wads of tape and tissue and foam. Changing head types is the most effective way to get the sound you want.

2. Get good cymbals. You CANNOT make bad cymbals sound good. Period.

3. Use good mics and very little (if any) Equalization. EQ can be very bad and destroy the sound. Don't put the mic as close to the drum as you can thinking that is going to get the best sound. Drums sounds are a composite of the materials that make up the drum. If you put the mic close to the skin, all you're going to hear is the skin. Let the sound develop before it reaches the mic. Play with placement rather than screw with the EQ. I just recently figured out that the body from my snare is captured by my tom mics and the mic on my snare picks up the articulation. Overheads get the crispness. Everything has to work in concert.

4. A good room. You don't realize the havoc a bad room can have on the sound when there are more than one or two mics recording. Get your acoustics in order.

Sorry for the diatribe, but I have been working on my drum sound for a long time and have gotten to be very proud of it. Now if I could just play ONE track without a mistake...

LOL As I read this, I was struck by how every single word resonates with me. I second this post--especially point #2 and the final comment!

 

[buryher17]

ive got to say the floor tom and the hanging toms [at times].

they just never sound .. right. tunning and new heads is the best thing, but its not like im gona buy some rqandom band i record new head , so tunning a 6 year old head isnt always workin for me lol.

i use a samson set, and it's not too bad, but i wish it culd be better.

 

[tangerine]

I think the hardest mike I've ever seen is Iron Mike Tyson Sorry

 

[gcapel]

Hey cult,

I hear what you're saying on the floor tom. Had some fun with it recently.

Here are some pics of what I did to get the best result (used a sm58 and it worked out great). Does need a little bit of gate in the mix though.

www.puresound.co.za/aok/pics.htm

Hope this helps you.

You need a pedal board. It ills me seeing all thoughs effect just sprawled out all over the floor (my wife would kill me). I bet some true bypassing would help your tone as well.

Awesome marshall amp.

How do you like the focusrite penta? If that is the penta. I own the tonefactory of the platnum series and i'm not too impressed with it.

 

[dgatwood]

2. Get good cymbals. You CANNOT make bad cymbals sound good. Period.

No, but it's easy to make relatively good cymbals sound bad. Use a dynamic microphone. Yikes! The worst cymbal sound I ever heard was a cymbal miked with a PG58. Lots of false tonality.

 

[Minion]

Fer Me it is the Bass drum, I can never get my bass drum to sound the way I want it to, I know most of it is because I need a new Skin as the one on there is still the crappy one that came with the kit but I just can"t afford $50 for a new skin right now.....

I can get it so the is sound listenable but I like my Bass drum to have that real Thumpy attack, sort of like the sound of Triggered Bass drums but without the Triggers but I can"t get the sound I want it the way it is,I can get is allmost close if I put some compression on the Bass drum but that causes other problems, also I"m sure an actual Kick drum mic would work better than the Low frequency dynamic I am useing.....

 

[PlayLikePage127]

Actually I would have to say that I have the hardest time miking the hi hat. Too close to the center and it you get nothing but ring... Too close on the outside or at an angle and you get nothing but suction and wind. I've given up and just left it to the overheads. Can anyone shed some light on this mystery?

 

[IronFlippy]

Hey cult,

I hear what you're saying on the floor tom. Had some fun with it recently.

Here are some pics of what I did to get the best result (used a sm58 and it worked out great). Does need a little bit of gate in the mix though.

www.puresound.co.za/aok/pics.htm

Hope this helps you.

Off topic, but how did you get that acoustic to not sound boomy? That condenser is pointed perpendicular to the body (past the neck joint), and then you have (what looks to be a 58) pointed towards the soundhole. I kind of want to hear what it sounded like, maybe your room had something to do with it.

 

[ozraves]

Mic'ing a drum kit is not the hardest thing in the world if you listen to the room before you place the kit. That's like the most important thing. Second, listen to each mic placement with as much isolation possible even if it means wearing a pair of isolating headphones. Third, make sure you put everything to mono to see if there are any phase issues. Normally, if it sounds good in mono then it'll be mixable.

 

[TragikRemix]

Actually I would have to say that I have the hardest time miking the hi hat. Too close to the center and it you get nothing but ring... Too close on the outside or at an angle and you get nothing but suction and wind. I've given up and just left it to the overheads. Can anyone shed some light on this mystery?

i typically aim for the middle, on an angle about 3-5" from the head of the mic to the top hat, with a SM57 of course. i dont get any problems at all when i do it that way. dont get too paranoid with that because when its mixed with all the other mics, you cant hear all those little details unless you solo the track, and then with the rest of the music on top, forget it!

 

[PeteHalo]

Is it true that you guys don't take the time difference between close miced tracks and OH tracks into concideration while mixing?

I'm no pro nor try to pretend to be one here but from my limited experience with time aligning bass and snare tracks to be in-phase with bass and snare hits on OH tracks I can say that it makes a huge difference in how those tracks sound like when mixed together. Theory behing this is that if you don't time align tracks there's bound to be a small delay of 3 - 5 ms. between the snare hit on OH track and on the close miced snare track which while mixed together cause quite audible comb filter effect that can be greatly reduced if not gotten rid off completely by movin the snare track a few ms. forward.

Any comments on this one?

 

[Reggie]

Is it true that you guys don't take the time difference between close miced tracks and OH tracks into concideration while mixing?

I'm no pro nor try to pretend to be one here but from my limited experience with time aligning bass and snare tracks to be in-phase with bass and snare hits on OH tracks I can say that it makes a huge difference in how those tracks sound like when mixed together. Theory behing this is that if you don't time align tracks there's bound to be a small delay of 3 - 5 ms. between the snare hit on OH track and on the close miced snare track which while mixed together cause quite audible comb filter effect that can be greatly reduced if not gotten rid off completely by movin the snare track a few ms. forward.

Any comments on this one?

Yeah sometimes scooting tracks around can help phase issues that weren't adjusted for in tracking, but it isn't always best. Sometimes it doesn't sound as full as capturing the initial impact up close and having more of the delayed bloom slightly after it, rather than scooted to where they are right on top of eachother. Know what I mean?

 

[PeteHalo]

Yeah sometimes scooting tracks around can help phase issues that weren't adjusted for in tracking, but it isn't always best. Sometimes it doesn't sound as full as capturing the initial impact up close and having more of the delayed bloom slightly after it, rather than scooted to where they are right on top of eachother. Know what I mean?

I see your point allright, but there's couple of things that you might not take into consideration here. First of all it's a proven fact that human ear does not percieve delays under 10ms any other way but as anomalities in frequency response. It takes a lot longer delay in order to make us hear it as echo or delay, something in the range of 30 to 50 ms. In that respect slight delays of a few ms. doesn't bring any space or room or whatever to the mix, it only sounds different frequency wise. I'm not saying it can't sound good but if it's unintentional you're not using all the means at your disposal to adjust the mix to your liking and that's bad. And it's even worse or makes things unneccassarily difficult if you then have to use EQ to iron out the frequency response anomalities that are caused by this comb filter effect cause by the time delay between signals. That's something like using eq to fix problems in a cheap mic's frequency response only a lot harder because of the nature of comb filter effect.

But what you can do by adjusting mic positions or using different mics is to try to minimize leakage from other close miked sources to particular close miked track and by doing this you're applying unconsenciously the classic 3:1 rule of thumb and that's because the phase issue in question here is greatly reduced and can be forgotten all together if the level of the signals mixed together differs more than 10dB.

 

[Reggie]

Whether I take all the theories into account or not, the fact remains that with some setups it sounds better time aligned and some setups it sound unnatural. I mean, do you always scoot up your overhead tracks to time-align with your room-mic tracks too? I tend to believe you are going to have frequency and phase differences between snare and OH mics whether they are time-aligned or not, just due to the fact that they are different distances from the source, aimed at different angles, have different freq responses, different capsule sensitivity, whatever. If you are able to hear what is going on as the mics are being set up, you can adjust for the best compromise of all this by using ears to hear what sounds "best"--which is a subjective thing, different for different people. I think you may be losing yourself some options if you default to doing the time-align thing no matter what. Again, not saying I don't do it sometimes.....sometimes time-aligned does sound "best."

 

[PeteHalo]

Whether I take all the theories into account or not, the fact remains that with some setups it sounds better time aligned and some setups it sound unnatural. I mean, do you always scoot up your overhead tracks to time-align with your room-mic tracks too?

No I don't and that's because there's supposed to be delay between them to create the illusion of space. The delay here is much longer and that's why human ear and brain detects that delay as delay and not as frequency change as in the case of close miced source and OH.

I tend to believe you are going to have frequency and phase differences between snare and OH mics whether they are time-aligned or not, just due to the fact that they are different distances from the source, aimed at different angles, have different freq responses, different capsule sensitivity, whatever.

But none of those things affect the phase relation of two signals only the frequency content of each signal.