Recording Drums Questions

[SBax]

I see more and more live bands place the two overheads on each side of the drum kit instead of the center x-y configuration. Is this because kits are getting bigger? Solves phase issues? The mike stands can't reach that far? Or is this just for live bands but in the studio it's still center x-y?

For recording drums I have two overhead Shure Beta Green 4.1 small diaphram condensor mikes to get the cymbals and kit. All the drums are individually miked to blend in as needed and for effects. This got me thinking about one part of Blue Bear's great post on mixing because I am always looking to improve my recorded drum sound.

"Also, Pre and Post Fader aux sends can be usefull when assigning a track to a reverb send. Sometimes, I have a whole bunch of snare in the overheads, and I am depending upon that overhead track to supply most of the snare sound. Now, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to feed the overhead mics to a reverb, so how do you get a snare to excite a reverb? Easy, you assign a Pre Fader aux send to the reverb and just keep the fader down on the snare track, but turn the Pre Fader Aux send up on the snare channel. Cool eh?"

I can't seen to wrap my mind around this. What pre-fader aux? The close snare mike? Is he saying just make the reverb on the close mike very wet?

Thanks so much.

 

[vox]

Yup, the snare is loud enough in the mix with just the overheads on, so he doesn't want to use the seperate close miced snare track, he still wants to add reverb to the snare but not to the whole kit so he can't add reverb to the overheads. Solution - leave the snare channel fader down but send to the reverb via a pre-fader Auxillary (instead of the usual post fader)