Overhead recommendations for a bad room

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Greg_L

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I record my drums in a bad room. I have no choice at this point. Right now, I close mic my drums with some cheapo dynamics and let those mics pick up the cymbals and hats. It works reasonably well but I'd like to try overheads. What mic's would yall recommend as overheads in a bad room?
 
I use a pair of Oktava MK012's (cardiod capsule, usually with the pad) not only in bad rooms, but recording a softer jazz kit (well, the kit is not soft - the drummer is actually capable of playing softly ;) ) in live gigs. The drums still end up almost totally isolated and sounding great. I usually mic them from behind the drummer's head, spaced pair.
 
Any quality mics will do. Their is really no way to cover up a bad room, although decent results can be had in one. Mess around with different stereo micing to see which one suits your room the best. BTW the way your micing is the complete opposite of how most people do it. When you get your condensers try to capture the best overall sound of the set you can, then add your close mics in to taste.
 
donger said:
BTW the way your micing is the complete opposite of how most people do it. When you get your condensers try to capture the best overall sound of the set you can, then add your close mics in to taste.
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Not only that, but if you are close micing, you might have more mics than you really need, which in a bad room will just make things worse as you keep layering on all the problems. Do what donger says - just use a pair of mics first. Work with the pair until you get a great sound. You may find you don't need to close mic anything, or maybe only the snare and kick if at all.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I close mic my toms so I can pan them how I like them. I can only record 2 tracks simultaneously, so I run my drum mics into a mixer, and then I have a L and R output from the mixer to my interface. From there, I record the L and R drum tracks as 2 mono tracks to make one stereo drum track. Thats the only way I know to do it while only being able to record 2 tracks at once. When I've experimented with overheads, the drums sound like they're being played in a box, and I can't pan anything. Also, the cymbals come in way too loud. Admittedly though, I'm not using any condensers. Maybe thats what I need.

So, how do you isolate and pan things like the individual toms with just 2 overheads?
 
Its called stereo imaging. Place your overheads so all the drums are panned correctly.
 
donger said:
Its called stereo imaging. Place your overheads so all the drums are panned correctly.
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Okay, I see. Thanks for the suggestions.

I understand what you're saying, but suppose I want to pan my floor-tom far right. How is that possible without bringing everything else picked up by that mic over there with it? I'm thinking I'd need to supplement the overheads with the close mic's, as you mentioned earlier.
 
Greg_L said:
Okay, I see. Thanks for the suggestions.

I understand what you're saying, but suppose I want to pan my floor-tom far right. How is that possible without bringing everything else picked up by that mic over there with it? I'm thinking I'd need to supplement the overheads with the close mic's, as you mentioned earlier.
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You would have the other mic picking up the other side of the kit, panned the opposite way - bringing everything picked up by that mic to the other side, balancing out the image.

Stereo mic techniques serve to reproduce sound in a natural way. If you were in a room with a drum set and the floor tom was struck, you would not hear it in only one ear, right? Both mics pick up the whole kit from two places, just like your ears.

You could use a "spaced pair" technique where one mic was close to the floor tom, and the other mic on the opposite side of the kit. Pan them fully apart and you will get a wide stereo image with the floor tom mostly on one side, yet not sounding totally unatural.

There are other techniques designed to give you (more or less) accurate stereo images (truer to what your ears actually hear). All have their pros and cons.

Google "stereo microphone recording techiques" or something. Do some reading. You'll really need to get a grip on it to make decent recordings.
 
You want something with a tad bit of reach to get into the kit and you'll want cardioid. I'd say get one of those MXL 990/991 kits and put the 990 on the snare side of the kit and the 991 on the floor tom side of the kit.
 
I hear if you take any Sony headphones and snap them in half, glue them to opposing walls and solder them into some into some 1/4 inch input jacks, you get the Led Zeppelin sound.
 
Okay, thanks for the replies everyone. Stuff to think about. I guess I'll be mic shopping soon.

Elton Bear - thats a great link. Thanks. Added it to my favorites.
 
There are mics that pick up less room. There are mics that pick up lots of the room. Obviously, in a bad-sounding room you want to deemphasize the room. Some good inexpensive mics for OH's that do that would be CAD M177, CAD M179, Oktava MK-319, Groove Tubes GT44/Sterling Audio ST44.
 
Dot said:
There are mics that pick up less room. There are mics that pick up lots of the room. Obviously, in a bad-sounding room you want to deemphasize the room. Some good inexpensive mics for OH's that do that would be CAD M177, CAD M179, Oktava MK-319, Groove Tubes GT44/Sterling Audio ST44.
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Cool. Thanks for the recommendations.
 
I use the same method of Micing my drums as you do(Mixer into Interface in stereo) and I close mic all of my Toms and I use 2 Omni condenser Overheads to capture the Cymbols...

I get a Pretty Good Drums sound considering the Cheapo Mics I use and the Cheapo Mixer I use...I will be upgradeing to a Delta 1010 soon and have been collecting or actually building an arsinal of Preamps so I can mic everything and adjust every mics levels.....


Good luck
 
Minion said:
I use the same method of Micing my drums as you do(Mixer into Interface in stereo) and I close mic all of my Toms and I use 2 Omni condenser Overheads to capture the Cymbols...

I get a Pretty Good Drums sound considering the Cheapo Mics I use and the Cheapo Mixer I use...I will be upgradeing to a Delta 1010 soon and have been collecting or actually building an arsinal of Preamps so I can mic everything and adjust every mics levels.....


Good luck
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Cool. Thanks for the help.

Does you mixer not have built-in pre-amps? My mixer is a cheapo, but it has built-in pre-amps. They're not the best thing going by far, but they serve their purpose. I've played with overheads in the past (although not with condenser mics), but scrapped the idea as I was always getting way too much cymbal overload - even with the O/H mic's gain turned way way down. But i see that many people only use overheads with a snare and kick mic and still get a good sound, so I'm obviously missing out on something. That's what i need to figure out.
 
screw you all
i like t1 (L)
t2 (R)
floor (center)

i know, i know.......... that's not how "it really is" but i do my best to make it that way :p

also in a bad room it often will help to hi-pass the overhead mics....
even (at the most) up to as much as 250HZ
YMMV

(that's assumeing that you have mic'd the kik snare and hopefully toms....)
 
^this is another reason to argue for close-miking the toms...if you high-pass even up to only 80-100hz, you're still going to be cutting some of the toms out of the OH tracks...i've seen low-tuned floor toms that have fundamentals that hit around 40hz, and it seems like even most rack roms have most of their "beef" in the 100-200hz range.
 
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