How to go about drums with 1 mic

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tfarrell_10

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Im getting ONE good recording mic to re-do my bands songs better.. and im a student so thats all im getting. How do i go about recording the best sound from the drums with only one mic? (placement-wise etc..)??

Also.. as far as panning and doubling tracks where should each instrument go?? im not too experienced at this

Cheers
 
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Instead of spending the money on one mic, why not spend the money for studio time where you could use many mics?
 
ditto, you don't use one mic, maybe a drum machine or sample programming.
 
Specific placement is gonna depend entirely on how the drums sound in the room.
As a general rule, though, you're gonna want to treat the drums as one instrument, so you're gonna wanna mic outside the near-field.
Just play around with placements far enough away that all drums are picked up evenly.
You're gonna need either good separation between your tracking room and control room, a really good set of headphones, or to do a whole lot of test recordings.
There's just no way to check the balance of all the drums without actually hearing what the mic hears and only what the mic hears.
 
i don't think you're going to be able to get a decent recording of drums with one mic. If that's all you have I would guess you would want to put it somewhere near your chest. Unless you want to try and record each piece of the drum kit separately, but that would just be ridiculous.

For the second part of your question, I'm not sure what you are asking. Are you talking about panning? If so, it's really whatever sounds good to you, but if 2 instruments share a frequency range you might want to pan them opposite each other to get some separation.
 
You can get really decent sound of drums with only one mic, especially if You're doing some vintage stuff. If you have a decent set of drums play a little with the sound of drums alone and then try to walk around the room with someone else playing it to hear a sweetspot. When You find it, put the mic there. Of course You will have to use a condenser mic. If You want more light sound with louder cimbals - put it more in the air and vice versa. You can then play with some EQ after recording to pull out some kick and snare drum. Put the drum track in the middle and that should do.
 
^^^ what he said.

You can get a decent recording of drums with one mike.

You may need to experiment a bit, but I once used an SDC placed about 1m in front of the kit and about 1.5m from the ground.
 
Interesting, I recorded our set with aprox. the same mic position, a little more moved to the side of hi-hat. I even have that recording if You want to hear it...
 
Less is more you can get great recordings with one mic no phase issues hurray!! Play around try different positions have fun.
 
Walking backwards down the stairs.

I don't know how so I would go with the specific methods that a few of the posters have described. But I know for an absolute certainty that you can get a good drum sound with one mic because I routinely used to do this, circa '82-'84. When I used to jam with my drumming buddy, we used a cassette recorder with a, what we always thought of as a, shitty inbuilt "mic" to record our jams. Every part of the drum kit was clear and you could hear the kick beautifully {I always loved Mick's hi hat and kick work}. It's not rose tinted nostalgia - I still have the tapes.
We never really thought about the quality of the drums, it's only recently that I've thought about this. Consequently, I can't remember where we'd place the 'box'. As far as I remember, it was usually at the other end of the room and the interesting thing is that the bass amp was always closer than the drums. Sometimes it was on a table, sometimes on the floor. When I eventually started multitracking, I was surprized that with a portastudio I couldn't get as good a drum sound as I could in the days when I never even thought about it ! So while I can't help you with specifics, I can encourage you that it can be done. As others have said, you'll have to experiment and work some. But you'll get there.
 
After you get your one good mic, why don't you beg steal or borrow a few others... I mean, you're a band right... what do you use on stage?

Whatever you can get, put one on snare and one on kick along with your one good mic as people have been saying... you then can add a bit of both, if it needs it...

Luck..
 
i'd put a +1 down for booking studio time, or doin your best to borrow some gear...even just mics for kick,snare and over heads would make a huge difference..

that said,i'm not suggesting that drums can't be done with one mic.....

i just wouldn't wana be the one trying it unless it was for a specific reason/sound..
 
I've done a few drum recordings with just one mic, for some reason I like it.

What really matters is:

* the drumset in the room should sound really good to begin with
* the drummer needs to play the kit in a balanced way - the ratio between the volume of the snare, kick and hi hat needs to make sense and not be way heavy on the hihat for instance
* the mic needs to be in the right place. My one mic usually ends up being about a foot in front of the kit about 20" from the ground. If I lower it I'll get less snare and more kick. If I move it to the right I'll get more hihat.

As far as panning: a basic start point would be drums, bass and lead vocals in the center and maybe a guitar on one side and another track, maybe a shaker or keyboard on the right side. Or maybe you want the keyboard to be through a stereo chorus and have it on both sides. Or maybe put the drums a tiny bit to the right and the bass a tiny bit to the left with the vocals in the center. There's a zillion ways, it just needs to feel like it sits right.

Here's some info, read about the FOK (front of kit) mic:
http://www.mercenary.com/3micdrumstuf.html
 
Dinty is giving good advice. Use an LDC out in front of the kit. You'll need to experiment with placement and play to the mic.

I have used a single AT 4050 in omni to great effect. I also have a well-treated room.

But to answer your question on point, you can get a great sound with a single mic.
 
To say that you can't get a good drum sound by using only one mic is completely untrue.

I'm not saying that this is a killer drum sound, but it's pretty good.

 
You shall go to the ball !

dastrick said:
To say that you can't get a good drum sound by using only one mic is completely untrue.

I'm not saying that this is a killer drum sound, but it's pretty good.

Click to expand...



^^^^^^^^^^^^^I'd be happy with this.....
But to just throw in another two pence worth.......I usually record drums in my kids room at home. One of my neighbours is really ill and I didn’t want to disturb him so I did some recording last night/this morning in the warehouse of the company I work for. I had done this once before and the recording was OK so as an interim measure, thought we’d have another go. Personally, I prefer the convenience and comfort of home ! Anyway, I did my usual set up of snare and kick on their own track, overheads and close miked toms fed through a mixer then balanced and fed into my recorder on two tracks. I usually mike the hi hat and feed that to it’s own track, just in case there’s some intricate work that I want emphasized. I decided to let the overheads deal with the hi hat this time around and so in my spare track, I thought I’d place a cheap and cheerful dynamic Behringer drum mic {from a set}. This was to act as my ‘room mike’. I put this mike in one of the vans with the back doors open, pointing more towards the bass drum but it was about 10 feet away so it would capture the whole kit. I wanted to see if the cylindrical shape of the van would make any difference. Turned the on board preamp up all the way and my mate and I tracked 7 songs, either guitar and drums or bass and drums.
When we’d listen back to each song on headphones, I couldn’t believe the room mic’s sound. In terms of capture, it got everything better {to my ears, which were, admittedly, increasingly tired as we recorded through the night} than the overheads. You could hear the kick clearly. It may not have had the boomph that close miking brings but it was clear.
Be encouraged ! You have to if you're a student in poverty ! :D
 
that youtube video is really impressive. i think that sounds great for one mic.

s
 
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