lurgan liar said:
Hey guys....Here are the mics i have at my disposal ...
MXL 990
MXL 991
Shure SM 58
Shure SM 58
Sennheiser e845
Any suggestions how i would go about micing a kit with these mics ....
I was going to unscrew the ball off the SM 58's and put one on snare and the other on the kick ...and use the 2 mxl's as overheads ....but where exactly would i put the over heads???
Thanks in advance
Why unscrew the ball from the 58's? You don't need to.
Personally, I would use the 991 as an overhead, from behind the drummer on a boom bring it directly over the drum throne and aim it straight down at the top of the drummer's head (make sure that it is secured so it doesn't fall and knock his brains out...or knock some sense into him - it all depends on the drummer
) or aim it at the drummer's knee (kick drum side). Place the mic about 12" or so above the drummer's head.
Build a tunnel in front of the kick using a chair or two (you could even use a couple of mic boom stands) and hang heavy blankets over it. (I've seen somebody make a frame out of 2" PVC pipe for this) and then stick the 990 in the end of the tunnel to mic the kick drum. The tunnel will "trap" a lot of the kick sound inside, and this helps isolate the kick drum and the kick drum mic so that it helps keep the rest of the kit out of the kick mic
Then for the snare I'd use the 845.
That will give you a good basic rock kit recording provided that the drums are well tuned. Any decent drummer plays dynamically, and this basic set up will give you a fairly natural sound of the kit. Then, for EQ you can just roll off some of the midrange, centered at a frequency that you like. (I tend to like to center my midrange around 700hz to 750hz, and then cut 12 to 15 db's, and that's pretty much it.
The 58's can be used on individual toms, or pairs of them, or even room mic's. Personally, I wouldn't even need them, as I like the sound of the three mic set up I've described. (well, a variation of it - I use 2 kicks, so there's a mic for each kick)
You could also use one 58 right on the mallet strike spot to pick up extra slap, and use the mic in the tunnel for the low end of the kick.
I know, everby will be whining about "this is mono". So what - it sounds good. It's not like you are panning every other drum channel to the hard left
when you normally record stereo tracks. Put a little reverb on it, and on the snare, and most people won't have any idea it's not recorded "in stereo".
It's usually a guitarist who makes this complaint about something not being in stereo - never realizing that they, themselves, are a mono source (unless they have pickups that allow them to pan each individual string independently.) Then never realize that virtually everything Zeppelin released had the drums in mono. (Hell, their first album had the drums recorded with one microphone overhead, pointing straight at Bonzo's kick drum leg - and that's it!)
Tim
