Sub Kick (woofer) mic placement?

[kirkbross]

I just built a DIY sub kick mic out of a 6½" woofer (which I will be running into one side of my brand new Great River MP-2NV or maybe my Chandler LTD-1). I'm curious about placement of this sub kick mic for maximum "woofage" ...

My kick drum currently has the rear head off, so it's an open drum (I have a D112 inside). For the woofer mic would I:

1) put it outside the kick (near where the back head would be) to give the low frequencies more time / distance to propagate
2) put it inside the kick, near the batter head to get it close to the action
3) put the rear head back on and put it close to that

Any tips would be great.

[beats workin']

sorry but this one REALLY REALLY deserves the classic reply:

place it where it sounds best for the song you're recording.
don't ask. use your ears. learn to fish.
david

[Yorke]

I built one too using an 8" woofer, it really picks up some nice sub-bass, so low I cannot believe the kick drum is producing it.

Here is what i found during the experimenting that I did, when you place it dead center. Your going to be picking up more of the attack of the beater, because its going to transfer to the front head.

I place it as close to the edge as possible, and It works fine, I have used it on both 20" and 22" kicks.

I recently started placing a Mojave Audio tube mic about a foot out in front of the kick drum, and mix the three tracks together. Its Phat!

Hope it helps, but like he said use your ears.

[mds]

I usually use it with both heads on and out in front of the drum dead center. Picks up tons of low thump and mixes well with other mics (I usually use an inside the kick mic and a front of the kick near the beater mic too).

Mike

[kirkbross]

Originally Posted by beats workin'

sorry but this one REALLY REALLY deserves the classic reply:

place it where it sounds best for the song you're recording.
don't ask. use your ears. learn to fish.
david

I know... I will do this, I'm mainly concerned that -- since the kick has only one head -- that the air flow out of the kick won't be concentrated / focused enough coming out of the drum.

I need to just experiment... but I'll need to come up with a more versatile mounting system. I was planning on just choosing a location and permanently hanging it there, but I think I might need to build a frame and mount it on a stand so I can move it around. Another problem is that my little iso room is 6' x 7' so the kick is right up against the wall and there isn't much room back there.

[tmcconnell]

I did it with a 6" woofer. I bought a cheap one, and the air didn't move the coil much which is predictable. I then got a really cheap but efficient speaker - it needs less energy to make motion, so will move the voice coil with less energy coming from the air. I think I also put in a resistor to raise the impedance a bit and protect the preamp, and then put the thing in front of the rear head. If its inside with both heads on, the pressure will distribute to both sides of the cone and therefore move the voice coil less. I mounted the speaker in a makeshift baffle - that's important - as big as the drum and parked it one inch from the head. wham. it was good. Make sure you measure the output voltage, current, impedance so as not to kill a perfectly good preamp. t.

[kirkbross]

Originally Posted by tmcconnell

...Make sure you measure the output voltage, current, impedance so as not to kill a perfectly good preamp. t.

Hmmm... It's an 8 ohm speaker... an engineer friend told me to just use a guitar cable... so I wired the tip of the ¼" jack to the + terminal of the speaker and the sleeve to the minus terminal. I was planning on just plugging this into the unbalanced ¼" jack of a pre. How can a passive speaker mic blow a pre? (I guess I'll have to try it out on my Digi002 pre before plugging it into my API or Chandler!)

[tmcconnell]

The watts that it takes to move a motor is in the same overall range that the same motor will generate when moved. So, if you use a power amp to drive a speaker, you should treat the power a speaker generates as being in the same range. So the question is would you plug the output of a power amp into the input of a microphone preamplifier? I hope not.

For a more precise answer you should ask the geek slutz forum here and I am certain someone will know exactly the risks - but I would assume you could fry an op amp with that sort of current .. and no one would provide warranty service... i think it would qualify as abuse. .

[liquidorange]

Originally Posted by beats workin'

sorry but this one REALLY REALLY deserves the classic reply:

place it where it sounds best for the song you're recording.
don't ask. use your ears. learn to fish.
david

no way! i read an article in a pro magazine and they said to use a sub mic as close as you need to or as far away from the source that will make it sound good is the key. the choice is yours.

[kirkbross]

Originally Posted by liquidorange

no way! i read an article in a pro magazine and they said to use a sub mic as close as you need to or as far away from the source that will make it sound good is the key. the choice is yours.

I tried placing the sub mic 80 light years away from the kick and it sounds great! ... the low frequencies really propagate fully at that distance. I also tried putting an electron mic inside each atom of both drum heads -- it added just the right amount of attack. I had to use a quindecillion channel mixer, but I bussed all of them (plus the sub) into a single channel and it's phat.

Then, naturally, I converted it to MIDI and triggered Superior Drummer 2.0.

[nigel saunders]

Originally Posted by kirkbross

I tried placing the sub mic 80 light years away from the kick and it sounds great! ... the low frequencies really propagate fully at that distance. I also tried putting an electron mic inside each atom of both drum heads -- it added just the right amount of attack. I had to use a quindecillion channel mixer, but I bussed all of them (plus the sub) into a single channel and it's phat.

Then, naturally, I converted it to MIDI and triggered Superior Drummer 2.0.

I found that too much trouble for the minimal improvement I observed, imho