is this bad mic placement?

[sadworld]

i tracked some tunes tonight and noticed that the rack tom mics are picking up as much snr as the snare track and overheads.... just looking at the signal, the tom hits are no bigger than the snrs in the tom tracks. i'm using 421's on them and the way the kit is set up i felt i had no other choices. it is pointing just over the edge of the rack toms but pretty much if it were a laser pointer, the laser would go over the toms and smack the snare. i wasn't expecting this much snr bleed, but what would you do? if i angle the mics down to point at the center of the toms the guy would have to raise his cymbals quite a bit.

 

[jonnyc]

Well you really need to point the end more towards the head. Make the drummer raise his cymbals. Remember its not about comfort, its about getting the sound right.

 

[grn]

what he said... does it sound right? try a different position and see if it makes a difference.

 

[Fletcher]

Well you really need to point the end more towards the head. Make the drummer raise his cymbals. Remember its not about comfort, its about getting the sound right.

In many ways it really is about comfort as you want the drummer to give you the best performance possible... however, in this particular case it's the drummer that would be my first guess as to why there is a problem in the first place.

By raising the cymbals you'll do two things... first; you'll have room to put the mics on the toms the way you'd like... second; you'll cause the drummer to hit the cymbals softer [I don't know why that happens... but most of the time when you raise the cymbals the drummer seems to hit the cymbals softer... which is usually a good thing, but not always].

Your major problem at the moment really isn't mic placement, it's the drummer. If the drummer was hitting the toms properly then you'd experience a significant level difference between the toms and the snare. Your drummer is hitting the toms rather lightly which is why you don't have the level difference you'd like.

So... where does that leave you? You can either replace the drummer with a good one; tell the drummer that he's hitting the toms like a pussy... which is giving you agita on getting the toms to sound like toms... so if he wouldn't mind hitting the drums as a man might hit the drums then your life will be easier; and last but not least [ok, probably least... this is a real "80's" trick]... get some "contact pickups" [like you might use on an acoustic guitar] and tape them to the top heads. Record their output on separate tracks. Use the output from these pickups as a "key/trigger" track for some noise gates so you can accentuate the glancing blows to the toms in the context of the mix.

I guess the 4th thing you could do [even if it's just as an excercize to show the drummer that he's playing like shit] is mic the kit with 2 or 3 mics [like it's one big instrument] and tell the drummer that he is now 100% responsible for the balance of the drums. If the hi hat is too loud... he's going to have to hit it softer... if the toms aren't loud enough, he's going to have to hit them harder, etc., etc., etc.

Hey... the 2-3 mic thing was used on most of the Led Zeppelin and Who records... why not yours?

Best of luck with it.

 

[chessrock]

Or you could just use a frequency-dependent / keyed noise gate that opens when the main frequency of the toms reaches a certain threshold.

Or just open the .wav forms up in an audio editor and manually silence everything but the tom hits.

.

 

[jonnyc]

Listen to fletcher, he's the man and he tells it like it is with no BS. Like fletch said, tell your drummer to hit the drums harder. Every drummer that comes thru the door gets the lecture regarding hitting the drums. I get a lot of those speed metal drummers that love to play with the velocity of a 4 year old girl and the speed of a chinese ping pong player. Unfortunately that doesn't hold up well on a recording. So all of them get the, "bash the fuck out of your toms" and "beat the hell out of your kick" pep talks. Just had a wonderful pupil come thru last week and he played exactly like I told him and his drum sound are wonderful, and he's the least talented drummer thats been in.

 

[brendandwyer]

I agree with Fletcher. The drummer has to be consistent, you can't expect to mix six drum tracks on the fly, or even with automation. They will sound funny. Explain gently, if he has an over inflated ego, that he needs to concentrate on keeping his dynamics more consistent, make loud sections loud and quiet sections quiet, but random loudness or drop outs. Sometimes it's more about the performance than about the engineering. I believe that it falls under the ever present axiom "Crap in = Crap out".