Halion
New member
Yesterday I helped some classmates record drums at school. We had this setup:
1 x Fairly Crappy (tm) drumset. Had a good snare though.
1 x Decently Nice (tm) cymbals. The hihat was a bit on a heavy side.
4 x e604 on 3 toms and we stuck the last one on the snare top.
2 x SM57 on the top and bottom of the snare.
2 x Neumann KM183 as overheads.
1 x Neumann KM120 on the hihat.
1 x D112 on the kick.
1 x U87 on entire kit.
The acoustics in the room were pretty bad. A decently treated room, but very small. We tried some different setups for the U87 just to see what we could get. At the last take, I stuck it at eye-height, pointing at the body of the drummer, just in front of the kit. Cardiorid pattern. We had the U87 hooked up to an SPL ChannelOne channel strip. This contains a pre, de-esser, low shelf, semi para mid (freq. and gain only) and high shelf, compressor with fixed attack/release and distortion. I boosted about 4 to 6 db (can't remember exactly) around 200 hz, and again 4 to 6 db around 9 khz . Set the compressor to about 6 db of reduction, to 9 db on heavey hits.
DAMN, I was amazed! The thing had everything in it. The best snare sound of all the mics, good balance between the toms, snare and kick. Perhaps a little on the dark side, but the boost at 9 khz helped alot. I love the sound! Added a little bit of the overheads for some stereo spread and a bit of kick for some more subs, but really, the mic alone was good enough already. I've never had such good results with just one mic. You could really hear the entire kit together, instead of a twack from the snare mic, boom from the kick mic, tsss from the hat mic etc.
I'm happy
1 x Fairly Crappy (tm) drumset. Had a good snare though.
1 x Decently Nice (tm) cymbals. The hihat was a bit on a heavy side.
4 x e604 on 3 toms and we stuck the last one on the snare top.
2 x SM57 on the top and bottom of the snare.
2 x Neumann KM183 as overheads.
1 x Neumann KM120 on the hihat.
1 x D112 on the kick.
1 x U87 on entire kit.
The acoustics in the room were pretty bad. A decently treated room, but very small. We tried some different setups for the U87 just to see what we could get. At the last take, I stuck it at eye-height, pointing at the body of the drummer, just in front of the kit. Cardiorid pattern. We had the U87 hooked up to an SPL ChannelOne channel strip. This contains a pre, de-esser, low shelf, semi para mid (freq. and gain only) and high shelf, compressor with fixed attack/release and distortion. I boosted about 4 to 6 db (can't remember exactly) around 200 hz, and again 4 to 6 db around 9 khz . Set the compressor to about 6 db of reduction, to 9 db on heavey hits.
DAMN, I was amazed! The thing had everything in it. The best snare sound of all the mics, good balance between the toms, snare and kick. Perhaps a little on the dark side, but the boost at 9 khz helped alot. I love the sound! Added a little bit of the overheads for some stereo spread and a bit of kick for some more subs, but really, the mic alone was good enough already. I've never had such good results with just one mic. You could really hear the entire kit together, instead of a twack from the snare mic, boom from the kick mic, tsss from the hat mic etc.
I'm happy
