Minimal Drum Miking With Maximum Control

[lakeshorephatty]

Just wondering if anyone is using this technique. Its working fantastic for me on the current project.

I only have 6 pre's, wanted to record the chordal instrument with the drums (guitar or piano) in the tracking sessions so that the bed tracks come out dynamic and tight. Bass would go in after.

So that takes away two pre's for the piano or guitar. I also wanted a room mic, thats a pre. Set it up in figure 8 to get a stereo room image by MS decoding or can use it in mono if desired.

So 3 pre's for the drums. 3 Mics. I stuck with the stereo pair of overheads using the "string technique" yes you actually can keep the oh's equidistant from both the kick and snare and have them in different spots. One over the drummer's non snare shoulder, the other almost directly over the center of the kit. I used KM184's for this, my best option.

Now here is the tricky part. I took an AT4050 and put it in figure 8. I placed it angled at about 30 degrees halfway between the kick batter head and snare bottom. If you like that snare bottom sound (beatles-esque) you can get some snare reinforcement here, and the bulk of the kick sound. By varying the distance kick to snare and angle etc, with a lot of trial and error, you can get a fantastic sound for both drums and the balance you want. I really like the AT4050 for snare and kick.

Now back at the compy if you want some further control you have 2 things.. phase of the kick/snare mic with respect to the overheads will affect the tone of that mic. Also you can put that recorded channel on two tracks.. on one you can cut mostly highs and have the meat of the kick, on the other you can center in on the main area of the snare (>500hz), now you can blend these two channels to remove low end, or you can adjust the phase of these two chanels relative to each other..

When you have a low pre count you get creative! This works really well for this project and the sound is as good as i can hope for with my limited selection of gear and the particular drummer and kit.

Obviously this requires a lot of patience, so is more for long winded album projects but i thought i'd throw that out there and see if anyone has tried it?

Here's a song if it will upload with the kick/snare channel split and the room sound blended in... I apologise for the quality.. had to re-mp3 to shorten the file.

[Fletcher]

Last time I did a kit with 3 mics I put a Crowley and Tripp "el diablo" in the kik drum and used a pair of Mercenary Audio "KM-69"s for overheads. Worked great. If you come to the AES show in NY I'll be happy to play it for you.

Peace.