According to Jimmy Page in the book "Light and Shade" about the drums on
When the Levee breaks
when asked "How on earth did you get the drum sound on
When the Levee breaks ?"
We were working on another song in the front room of Headley Grange when a second drum kit showed up. Rather than stop what we were doing, we told the people bringing it in to just set it up in the entrance hallway. The hall was massive and in the middle of it was a staircase that went up three stories. Later, Bonzo went out to test the kit and the sound was huge because the area was so cavernous. So we said "We're not going to take the drums out of here !"
Andy Johns hung a couple of M160 microphones down from the second floor, compressed them, added some echo and compressed that as well and that was all we needed. The acoustics of the stairwell happened to be so balanced that we didn't even need to mike the kick drum. Jonesy and I came out in the hallway with our headphones and left the amps back in the room and banged out the rhythm track to "When the Levee breaks" right then and there.
Later, when asked if he regretted not stumbling on the sound sooner {it was one of the last tracks recorded for the album along with others that later ended up on "Physical Graffiti"} he said
No, that would have been a trap. You wouldn't want everything to sound as big as that. It works because it's in contrast to everything else
I made the point in a thread a couple of years ago that for me, the significance of the drums on that song is that none of the drums on any of the other songs were recorded that way. Neither did they ever record any of the drums on any other song like that ever again, even though they recorded parts of "Houses of the holy" and "Physical Graffiti" at the same house.
Levee is a total one off.
Page says he worked really hard with mic placements on drums during Zeppelin {he rates it as his major contribution as an engineer/producer} because he felt drums sounded crap in the 60s. His mantra was "distance = depth."
I have wanted to set myself a challenge of using just ONE mic to record a kit, has anyone done it before here ?
When I started multi~tracking at home in '92 on four and eight tracks, I could never understand why the sound of the drums was never as good as it was back in the 80s on a shitty boom box ! I have tons of jams I recorded while on bass, circa '82~'84 and you can always hear every part of the drums so clearly. So it was a surprise when I found I couldn't achieve the same with vastly superior equipment.
Obviously, I had much to learn !
I used to put three mics through a mic mixer, balance and then record on one track. Sometimes, it sounded good......until I mixed in everything else. I specifically moved over to digital and the ability to record on 8 tracks at once so I could capture the drums as I wanted {took a while though, through much trial and error}. Anyway, a few years back, I was recording with a friend in the warehouse of my workplace and in addition to my standard miking, I had a single crummy superlux mic rigged up in the back of one of the vans to act as a kind of poor man's room mic. It was about 8 or 9 feet away from the kit, about 4 feet off the ground, pointed somewhere between the the top of the bass drum and the top of the rack toms. Later, when I listened to the 9 or so songs we recorded that night, I could not believe that one mic. It sounded neat {to my ears}. It was better than the overheads and the kick was so clear and prominent. The snare had a lovely snap to it that I've rarely achieved.
It was a dynamic mic, to boot. Maybe if you have a dynamic
and a condenser, you could set them up next to each other and see which sounds better.
For all that though, I wouldn't ever again record with just the one mic !