Creative Drum Recording

There are almost infinite possibilities when recording drums. The number of variables between the drummer, kit, room, equipment, and style of the music- not to mention the amount of time in which to accomplish said recording- makes one magic bullet approach impossible. Every good engineer has an ever-growing bag of tricks. Here are some of mine.

Minimal mics

If a good kit, drummer, and room all converge, there’s no reason a few mics can’t capture the whole experience as it is in the room. The drums on Felt’s “Think of Me” are an example of this. I used a fet47 a couple feet in front of the kit and two 452s (cardiod) spaced out about eye level on either side of the 47, pointed at the snare.

The first record I ever worked on, the engineer used spaced omnis to great effect. The kick and snare were miced normally. The only other mics used were two omnidirectional mics on either side of the kit. It’s important to keep them equidistant from the snare to keep it in the middle of the stereo image. As I remember they were C12As slightly below eye level directly to the sides of the kit. The height of the omnis above the floor can be used to adjust the balance of cymbals to the rest of the kit. I have seen them almost on the floor too. The trick with this approach is the drummer has to know how to balance himself well and make the toms really sing. You are really locking yourself in with this technique, so it has to be right!

One mic over the kit? It had better be a good one! Worked for Ringo…

Remember how I said room mics were an article unto themselves? Here’s a couple of tricks:

I usually prefer using coincident pairs or stereo mics to widely spaced mics. The stereo image from an xy or m/s pair always seems more focused. I hate getting drum tracks to mix where the room wasn’t that great to begin with, and the mics were spaced way apart. Usually the drums sound like they are scattered all over the place.

If you want to maximize the “roominess” of a room, you can create a psudo-PZM by taking a small condenser and point it directly at the floor. Lay down a credit card or thin piece of cardboard and rest the mic head-down on it. Tighten everything down and slide out the card, leaving a very small gap. At this point you have essentially a PZM. A widely spaced pair of these can create a very roomy sound. I have placed gobos between the kit and these mics before too. This gets even more distant sounding. This works especially well on a nice wood floor.

Compressing the room mics is another good way to make a small room sound bigger. A fast attack can minimize the direct drum sound and emphasize the decay of the room. Be careful since this can quickly devolve into “all buttons in” on the 1176 super-squash-fest. This may be fun while you are doing it, but the poor guy who has to mix it may not enjoy having his hands tied.

Wacky stuff

I once put an AKG BX10 spring reverb next to a kit. I didn’t feed it any input. All I was hearing was the acoustic energy from the kit exciting the springs. The balance was surprisingly good and every hit had that springy tail like if you kicked a guitar amp.

Want a trashy sound? Put one mic in an empty (if not unused) wastebasket, pointed at the bottom, somewhere in front of the kit.

Hang a PZM mic under the snare. The trick here is to suspend the PZM so that it hangs freely, thus depriving it of a solid surface to rest on. The result will be a very crispy-thin sound that can add “snap” to the kit.

More than once, I have seen drum bleed picked up from a guitar or bass used as some sort of wacky lo-fi effect. This has always happened by accident, but I have certainly gone out of my way to do weirder stuff than that.

Never get rid of broken mics unless the pass no signal whatsoever. You never know when you might want some kind of weird lo-fi effect. Every good studio has a stash of crappy/semi-broken mics for just this purpose.

Any speaker can be a microphone. Sometimes this yields some crazy results!

The lo-fi bass & drums on Kurt Hunter’s “Just For Tonight” were re-amped through a kid’s robot voice-changer toy. I know lots of guys that have a bag full of funky toys and gadgets just for this purpose.

Here is a link:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/M...88956&s=143441

Ultimately there’s only one rule: Garbage in – garbage out.