How to mic drums with these mics?

[Deester]

Hi all,

Currently we own 2 sm57's, an sm58 and a cheapo radio shack mic (Looks like a black sm58)

How can we best use these to mic up a drum kit for recording?

Also, we are thinking of getting a Rode NT1 or a marshall, if we had one of these as well as the above, how would that change the micing configuration?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers Dee

 

[bvaleria]

Get the Rode, throw away the RS mic....

Use the SM58 on the kick, an SM57 on the snare, the other 57 in-between a couple of toms, and the Rode as an overhead...

Bruce Valeriani
Blue Bear Sound

 

[Deester]

Thanks Bruce,

Is it not possible for me to get some stereo width with this mic setup? Pan the toms towards the left and snare to right? I'm lead to believe that the snare should be in the middle?

Or do I just need more mics for stereo?

 

[bvaleria]

Stereo drums are usually some variation of the following:

- Snare - pan centre (common), but I pan it very slightly off-centre to the right
- Kick - dead centre
- Toms - if you've close-mic'd each tom, you would spread them across from left to right. With only 1 mic on 2 toms, you could only position it off-centre to suit your taste.
- Cymbals - a pair of overheads panned left/right. Again with only 1 mic you're limited as to the stereo field you can provide.
- Hi-hat - panned slightly more right than the snare is. But more often, it simply bleeds thru from the overheads and doesn't need to be close-mic'd on its own, unless you're really trying to capture a sound (kinda like Steely Dan's "Peg" from AJA)

For myself, I try to re-create the sound field of a drum kit from the listener's perspective... but many engineers have varying opinions on this....

Without an overhead pair and multiple-mics on the Toms, you're not going to be able to provide as detailed a stereo image, but you should be able to get a very reasonable sound - stereo image is very nice to hear on drums, but not *absolutely* essential....

Bruce