Microphone techniques

[Guest]

Post your drum micing techniques here.

[john]

Hi

I thought someone might have some recommendations for Mike placement with the aim of reducing spill and capturing the sound of the kit. What mikes, placement damping, EQ etc.

Cheers

John

[Nightwolf]

We used a mattress leaned against the Bassdrum on this:

http://www.mp3.com/stressmonkey

[TheOne]

Hi

Nice board by the way.

Once we used pillows in the bass drum, which was fine until our bass guitar player fell asleep with his head on the pillows. We couldn't wake him and went ahead with the take, and still he didn't wake. Makes for an interesting recording...

TheOne

[edisonfreeman]

Hi

I thought someone might have some recommendations for Mike placement with the aim of reducing spill and capturing the sound of the kit. What mikes, placement damping, EQ etc.

Cheers

John

Well, my method is bottom heads off everything except snare (duhh...) and use a dampered head.  Remo pinstripes work great for me, I tune my drums VERY deep, and mount large diaphragm condensors (ADK A-51's) 4 inches below the center of the head way up INSIDE the 16" and 14" floor tom.  I use SM57's the same way in the 10" and 12" mounted toms.  I put an SM57 1" away from the snare head at the rim, angled in to the center and pointing directly at the throne.  For the Kick I use a Shure Beta52 4" away from the point where the beater hits, and a large diapragm condensor  (Behringer B-2!) about a foot behind it, to get an accentuated "click".  Overheads (ATM33a) mounted together pointing away from one another to eliminate phasing problems, straight out toward crash cymbals.

There is just NO leak into those Tom mics.  A slight leak of snare through the kick drum head into the Beta52.  I EQ that mic to be TOTAL low end.  Slight leak into the condensor, I parametrically EQ that right out.  Total control.

Snare mic gets a lot of hi-hat.  I don't know of any way to change that, but it's ok, because the snare comes out way louder.

Overheads get mostly cymbals, but also snare and hat, mounted toms on fills, not much from kick or floor toms.

I record 9 channels simultaneously just for drums.

This gets just the sound i am after.

[Guest]

How do you compensate for the "toobie" sound kind of like being inside of a pipe, miking your toms from the inside?

[edisonfreeman]

How do you compensate for the "toobie" sound kind of like being inside of a pipe, miking your toms from the inside?

Just getting closer to the head is the only way.  It's most critical on the smaller diameter Toms.  As long as I stay 4" or closer it hasn't been a prob for me.  Plus I play fills quite hard!