micing a drum kit with many toms and cymbals

  • Thread starter Thread starter willow
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willow

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Hi,

As mentioned before I am a drummer who has been at it for many years, yet I don't know much about mics since this was always done for me.

I have a solo project and I will be playing live very soon, so I had to buy my own mics. Since I have a big kit, I cannot afford to buy great quality mics. I purchased a 7-piece Samson mic kit. (1 kick, 1 snare, 3 toms, 2 condensers)

I have 6,8,10,12,13,15, Toms, 16,18 Floor Toms, 1 Bass w/double pedal, 2 14" Snare drums, and 8 cymbals and a few misc. sounds. I know..this seems like alot, but I actually do use it all and everything is consolodated in minimum space.(only two cymbal stands!)

Anyway, I was thinking on buying another Samson kit (5-piece) which would just about cover all my toms, etc.

Do I really need to mic each tom? (besides 6 and 8, which I won't be micing seperate)

Can I get by with just the 5 drum mics and 2 overheads?

This 5-piece kit is really not that expensive, but then I need a lot of cables too.

What about using snakes?? I don't know much about these. I would still need seperate cables anyway, right?

The guitar player is going to buy the PA mixer. Any suggestions on an inexpensive unit that would work for us live??

Thanks for any help,
Airwreck

P.S. This is probably not the right forum, but if anyone is interested, check out garageband.com enter search and type in Cosmic Warrior This was my last project with a guitar player from Mexico who shreads. I called him Jose Satriani!

Thanks!
 
willow said:
Hi,
Do I really need to mic each tom? (besides 6 and 8, which I won't be micing seperate)
Thanks!
Click to expand...
If you have 1 between the toms you will be fine
 
There are a lot of ways to do this. And most dependent is how you hit the toms, and how they are tuned. If they are loud and open sounding (as opposed to hit softly or dampened a lot....again both from playing technique and tuning), there is actually not much of a need for individually mic'ed toms. But this can be rare. If you need some individual control, I'd go with what the guy above me said, put one mic in between each two toms. You are going to have to be extremely careful with phase relationships, otherwise your drums can sound washy and thin, this is very noticeable with bleed between two close microphones, or between overheads and other close mics.
 
I would return the sampson kit and get a couple of better mics. A bunch of cheap mics on a drum kit isn't going to be anywhere near as good as one quality mic a few feet away from the kit.
 
If, like I am imagining, this is for live use, I would mic as many as you can. Also gate them. I am imagining this is for pure rock with a kit that size. The more individually mic'ed toms you have, the less bleed form other things you will get. Splitting mics between toms on a live stage will make it very difficult to get a good tight and punchy drum sound. You will need a bunch of gates to achieve this as well. I would recommend individually micing and gating each tom if you are serious about a good tom sound. I would most likely take this one step further even and get your own submixer for just toms. If you are playing a lot of clubs, then you won't have the 8 channels necessary to individually mic your toms. I would submix them on your own mixer, with your own gates, and send the FOH console a stereo mix of toms. In my opinion, you can only expect most clubs to be able to mic you up for a 6 piece kit. This sounds like a 10 piece kit. I would also build a custom cable loom for your toms with cables at the approximate length to get from your submixer to your individual toms and then gaff tape the cables in a nice loom that threads through your stand, or even hangs just below them from tie lines so it doesn't get too sloppy looking. The gates are pretty necessary though with that many mics. If you get all of your toms sounding good in headphones or something (sounding good in relation to each other), the FOH engineer should be able to just EQ the submix appropriately to match the PA and the other tones on your kit. This isn't an easy or cheap solution, but I think it is a good compromise between portability, sound quality, and speed.

Also, from your other thread I am guessing that with all the cymbals you mentioned here (since you needed to mic some toms from the bottom), that the cymbals are blocking the sound of a few of the toms which means the Overhead mics really won't as effective for tom sounds. By submixing the toms you can then give FOH just 8 channels of drums.
1.Kick
2. Snare 1
3. Snare 2
4. Hi Hat
5. Toms Left
6. Toms Right
7. Overhead Left
8. Overhead Right

As far as a mixer goes, Allen Heath is the cheapest half way decent mixer I can reccomend if you are serious about your sound. One other thing, If you do buy another Samson kit, that will give you two kick mics. I would use the six tom mics on your rack toms, the two kick mics on your two floor toms, and then invest in a real kick mic. Akg D112, Shure Beta 52, Sennheiser 602, or Audix D6. Every body has their own opinions on these mics, but me personally after having worked with all of them on MANY occasions really don't have a preference between any of them. I can always get what I want without much trouble. To me the tuning of the PA and the quality of the console are far more important than mic choice. Personally, I do not like the Sennheiser 421, the EV RE20, the Audix D4 or the Audio Technica ATM25 for live rock kick drums. I have used the Samsons a couple of times and have no problems getting the toms to sound good (as long as the kit was tuned halfway decently), but will not use the kick mic on kick drums unless I have no other choices. However, I do carry a little Midas everywhere I go so that helps a lot:D
 
Thanks for your help guys

As much as I would like to mic 2 drums with one mic, I think I will go the route that Xstatic mentions because they are clip-on mics and I don't think that works unless you have stands?? I want to avoid all the stands except two booms for overheads.

BTW, I managed to position all the mics on the first three toms, although the clip-ons supplied with the samsons are not that flexible and do not leave that much room for playing on the small toms. Also, the clip-ons barely fit on my rims, like I have to force them on, I don't think they will last too long without breaking. Oh Well!
 
There are nicer aftermarket clamps. Shure makes some metal ones that work well.
 
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