What’s the deal with the mono drum room mic?

[SRS]

I do it all the time. Reason being is not running out of mics or channels, but because it holds the kit together with the other elements. Even if no compression or EQ is added to this one mic, ran up the middle tucked in under the rest of the kit, it will often times (hate to use the term) 'glue' it together.

You could always split it and time delay it a tad and effect them both differently if you wish (sorta make your own stereo pair of them). Of course you know all of this, being as you have extensive knowledge with mixing. If it doesn't fit, mute it.

Options are always nice, but a line has to be drawn somewhere. Not sure if Terry Bozzio has a single mono room mic on his kit in the studio commonly, but it just might hold that mothership together with just a single tool, a mono room mic.

[norman_nomad]

Originally Posted by not_so_new

I am not 100% sure who "MixShmix" is but I have a hunch and my hunch is he doesn't need any lectures in recording or mixing....

I don't know who he is either, but judging from the title of the thread I'm going to make an educated guess and say: Seinfeld?

[drBill]

Originally Posted by stevep

I used to track 3 room mics, one middle the others as far away as i could get them

Now, im tracking a single mic about 10ft in front of the drums
and it gets tracked dry, but in the mix it gets smashed

the wide mics never made it to the final mix, so i decided to keep it simple

Plus, the overheads are in stereo

im using an R84 for my room mic now days

sometimes during the mix, ill run the snare,kick,toms to the live room and return it to the MC77 in full smash mode

it helps to get the room smashed sound without a bunch of wash from the cymbals and hats

Nice Steve!

There's no doubt that it all depends on the sstyle of music and the "sound" you're after. We don't all hear things the same. That and styles change. For all I know, out of phase drums may come into style in a few years. Won't that be fun.

I say, mix what ya got!

bp

[John Suitcase]

I think it's just a fad. For a while I was using two room mics, years ago. Then for a long time, I was using no room mics, except on vocals. Then I started using the mono room mic, which can be cool for adding some grungy guts underneath. Then, a few sessions back I started using the stereo room mics again. The room mics don't sound terribly hip or modern, but they do sound more realistic, and give the drums that big 'like being there' feeling. So, if the room is any good at all, I've been tracking stereo rooms, and a crunchy up close mono room.

If and when big roomy drums come back into fashion, we'll all be tracking fancy stereo mics in nice big rooms again. Until then, the mono mid-room mic is the new standard.

[TheRealRoach]

I always run two mono room mics. ;P

That's all you can really consider them because i usually have them a good 20 feet away from each other. I'm fully with the OP on this one.

[vernier]

With a room mic, you're creating (not a vacuum). Not-A-vacuum is what you're creating, and just that. So, just throw up anything, any mic at all, and be done with it.

[kats]

Originally Posted by MixShmix

I'm really sorry to hear that stereo ambience makes you dizzy. You might want to see someone about that.

Actually I was talking about OH's and never said they were mic'd in stereo. Just two OH's...you know what I mean.

Secondly Bob, my head is three feet wide and I am very sensative to stereo imaging and I'd appreciate if you'd keep the medical jokes to a minimum.

[compasspnt]

Well I am fortunate to mix 98% of what I track/overdub, and in the past couple of years I have started using fewer and fewer (NB: not "less") microphones on drums.

Nowadays, even my "overhead" is mono, and if there is a room microphone at all, then it too is singular-sounding.

When it's time to mix, I am finding this to produce more "natural" results, at least in my feeble brain's opinion.

But, as I often say, "Whatever Works."



Oh yeah, Bonham tracks were sometimes mono, especially early on ...I remember (III) manually panning the centered drum track from C, then L > R during rolls, then quickly back to C for "the return of the beat." A couple of places, I can still hear the snare rushing back towards the middle.

[colinmiller]

These days I just use a DI for room.

[blackfish]

Originally Posted by colinmiller

These days I just use a DI for room.

agreed...then reamp through my electric pocket trumpet to the 3630 on mild mush setting, split output sending one to the board (2x4) and one to my waldorf. Trigger a saw mod patch in time to BFD playing drums sent back out to room di etc.
trust me...the wave of the future.

[nickynicknick]

Originally Posted by MixShmix

What I forgot to say, and probably the most important bit is; the mixer can always pan both tracks of a stereo pair to the center, or just use one of them if he prefers that sort of thing. But if it was recorded in mono, the mixer, producer or artist has absolutely no choice. Not very professional, IMHO.

Dude...it's really not a big deal and it is a specific vibe that way...why are you so bent outta shape....Artist/Producer's choice....maybe you should just refuse to mix any project where you get a mono room....have your manager put it in your "rider" that once the project gets to you, you make all the creative decisions... and screw what the Artist wants....and please tell me how the drums still can't be in stereo because you have a mono room?

Nick

[grammo76]

+1 on the mono room mic, preferably ribbon, squish it, blend with over heads to taste. it always helps me get my kit sounding natural and together... a good drummer always helps to...but thats a whole other thread i'm sure.

[Berolzheimer]

I'm with Bob here. I usually create a very narrow stereo image for the drums, I think it's cheesy to hear the toms panning across the mix whenever there's a fill, and it allows the rest of the mix to sound much wider. BUT I like to wrap a wider room ambience around that narrowly panned or mono drumkit.

[daniel c]

Originally Posted by nickynicknick

and please tell me how the drums still can't be in stereo because you have a mono room?

Bob is talking about the ambience, not the kit.

[d. gauss]

i'm sure i'm totally out of favor here and that's cool.
i've been using just 2 mics TOTAL on drums lately. an OH and a far out kick. as much as i LOVE MixShmix's work (his stellar mixes are probably responsible for getting me into this whole recording thing), but i guess i'm now stuck in/infatuated with a bygone era, i.e. louis jordan, stax , chess or new orleans/earl palmer stuff. and just remember, that's why i qualify for food stamps and MixShmix um, doesn't. :)

[drBill]

Originally Posted by daniel c

Bob is talking about the ambience, not the kit.

I guess everyone does things different, but in mixing drums that I _track_, I tend to use the OH's for ambience more than the room mics. I guess maybe I'm up a little higher with them than others. ???

[chymer]

Originally Posted by MixShmix

Will somebody explain this phenomenon to me please. As a mixer, I keep getting projects with a single, mono room/ambience track for the drums. There will be stereo piano, stereo Hammond/Leslie, stereo synthesizers, stereo backing vocals sometimes even stereo guitar, (yeah, that makes a lot of sense!) stereo drums, but then there’s that one, single, lonely drum room track! I’ve read comments on strings in this very forum from those of you who engage in this practice. Please explain!

Most records for the last 30 or 40 years have been released in stereo. TV is now stereo, and often 5.1 surround. There’s even stereo AM radio, although I’ve never personally experienced this curious technology. Humans tend to have two ears. When one is in a natural ambient environment, (like a room where drums are being played) each ear receives ambient sounds slightly differently, creating a stereo effect.

Now, I’m certainly not one to tell anyone how they should record or mix, but it seems to me that the engineer who recorded an album that I just mixed is actually insisting that I mix it his way, with his mono room track down the middle, or off to one side or, I don’t know... something! I really don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with it. No matter what I do, it just sounds ridiculous. And forget about getting a nice drum ambience in surround! I usually just turn it off and try to create it artificially.

Do ya think the guy just ran out of mics? I don’t know—it was a pretty big budget album recorded at a big LA studio, so that’s kinda hard to believe. Maybe he just didn’t think it was important enough to waste two mics on. Then why did he record it at all? It was recorded on a popular DAW system, so he couldn’t have been worried about running out of tracks.

Even though I’ve been doing this more years than I care to mention here, I’m the first to admit I don’t know anywhere near everything about recording. One of the reasons I’m still doing it is that I’m always learning new stuff, so please, someone tell me what this is all about!

Thank you very much.

Now, i dont know if you are actually Bob Clearmountain, but Im sure you can find what to do with that lonely room mic
chymer

[chymer]

Btw, Ill tell you what I would do because you asked. he he

I would try it up the middle and EQ it to help bring out the "AIR" for the kick or snare.

I would also try keying a gate on the room mic with the kick or snare and compressing and EQing after the gate. This may help give the snare or kick a nice natural punch. You might have to move the room mic back in the DAW so the transients fire off nice and tight.

you could also try sending the room to a reverb unit and getting a stereo ambiance...

I would also scrap it and not use it if I didnt like its tone, lets face it some room mics sound like turd, some like pure gold.

Also, if you are "Bob", i love your work and its so refreshing to know that at whatever level your at we can learn cool stuff....what a great ride!!!!

Chymer

[Fleaman]

Originally Posted by chymer

Now, i dont know if you are actually Bob Clearmountain, but Im sure you can find what to do with that lonely room mic
chymer

He is

[wwittman]

Originally Posted by MixShmix

... but it seems to me that the engineer who recorded an album that I just mixed is actually insisting that I mix it his way, ...

exactly.
as well he SHOULD, if he did his job.

surely there is a PRODUCER who made BOTH decisions (how it sounded good to record, and how you should mix it)
right?

you know, like all GOOD records?

[joelpatterson]

Hmmm... now what's that TONE I'm hearing....?

[colinmiller]

The issue is that you have a stereo kit that matches how the kit would sound in a room, but the ambience is then mono which is unnatural as it doesn't represent what the drum kit would sound like. I somehow doubt Bob has any toulble making drums sound good in a mix or figuring out how to get punch, etc. Heck, he's the one that pretty much invented the technique of triggering the room to kick and snare, or automating the cuts on the room mics between every kick and snare hit.

But I think the issue is the mindset of, why wouldn't you want to capture the sound of the instrument as it would naturally sound, and the ambience of the room it's recorded in is not going to be mono in the center. Of course it's art so there is no rule that things have to sound natural, but the argument is that if it's recorded in stereo, that decision can be made later.

One argument to that is that it's not the same as a single mic in the middle. That I personally disagree with because a mono mic is not going to sound different if it's in the middle, left or right. So long as it's the same distance from the kick and snare, it's not going to change the impact. This notion that somehow if the mic is center front to the kit gets more impact isn't true. You could argue that off to the side it might get more of the ride or hat (depending on the side), but in the middle, you might get more of whatever cymbal is closer to the center. Either way it all comes out the same. The other argument would be that the sum of two mics cancels out some frequencies and gets less impact, but that just means that the mics were not placed right. They should always be checked in mono along with the OHs.

The chances of an artist asking specifically for a mono room mic are very unlikely, though that's always a possibility and if it's the case, then that's how it should be. But simply because a track only has a mono room mic, doesn't mean that's what the artist wanted. They might be expecting that it's something done in the mix and then get upset come mix time that they don't have stereo ambience (though they may not realize that's what they are missing). But again, with 2 mics, and a note in the track sheet, or comments, and just one of the mics can be used.

That being said, I am against the idea of there being a right and a wrong way, I'm just expressing the non-mono-room-mic perspective, which I fall into more often. I think if someone likes the sound of a mono ambience in a stereo drum recording, then they should do what works for them. I personally am just not as good at getting it to work, because it sounds odd to me (again, that's only opinion) if the whole kit isn't intended to be mono.

[daniel c]

Originally Posted by drBill

I guess everyone does things different, but in mixing drums that I _track_, I tend to use the OH's for ambience more than the room mics. I guess maybe I'm up a little higher with them than others. ???

Well, yes I agree, but it is a different sound. It also depends on where the kit is set up during the recording, and as you said how close the OH's are. I'm sure that you would agree that if the kit has been recorded in a small space instead of in the middle of a big room, you'll have a different kind of ambience.

Maybe that's what is happening and prompted MixShmix to start this thread, more and more kits are being recorded in small rooms instead of large spaces, therefore you don't get that same decay and spread. Small rooms, less space, less space for mics....

I dunno. Anyway, as you said, we all do it our own way, have our methods and make our own judgements, and know what we like. It's a good thing that tiramisu isn't the only flavour at the ice cream bar.

[Fleaman]

Originally Posted by colinmiller

One argument to that is that it's not the same as a single mic in the middle. That I personally disagree with because a mono mic is not going to sound different if it's in the middle, left or right. So long as it's the same distance from the kick and snare, it's not going to change the impact. This notion that somehow if the mic is center front to the kit gets more impact isn't true. You could argue that off to the side it might get more of the ride or hat (depending on the side), but in the middle, you might get more of whatever cymbal is closer to the center. Either way it all comes out the same. The other argument would be that the sum of two mics cancels out some frequencies and gets less impact, but that just means that the mics were not placed right. They should always be checked in mono along with the OHs.

.

If spaced room pair, you can not get the same impact across the low-end relative to 1 mono mic. You can place them the best you can to reduce phasing issues, but not eliminate them.

But an XY stereo pair in the middle pretty much gets that single mono impact down.

You do bring up an interesting point though....even with a spaced room pair, the mixer could always just use one of the mics as mono if he/she wants to. One could also set up 3 mics....LCR.

I think Bob brings up a point from the mixing perspective; As a mixer you want as many options available to use...even though you may use a fraction of those options, a mixer would like to have them available for production purposes. These days tracks are not an issue as in the past, so he has a point.

If I were recording tracks that I knew were going to be mixed by someone else, I probably wouldn't limit the mixer to a mono room mic unless it was my project or band and I wanted to restrict the mixing options for a better chance of getting my production/sound across in the end.

[YZ!]

XY for me is no good for room miking, at least for drums... it will give a smallish perspective of the kit that can be hard to mix in.

But works for surround...

IMHO room mics should be omni, and placed one at a time: find a good-sounding spot for the first one then find another spot for the second.

Fine-tune the positions until you get them working as intended in stereo and mono.

One of the usual problems I've been finding lately is "room" tracks that end up being no more than "far OHs".

A single mic 3-4" away from the drum kit is what I sometimes used as the _only_ drum mic, so it does not seem to qualify for "room" sound unless the room is quite reverberant.

One thing though: if MixShmix, whoever he might be, is finding a mono room mic as something that makes his mixing difficult to the point of writing about it in a public forum, then some consideration should be given to the subject.

Perhaps some other people who have had success mixing mono room mics could chime in and give examples of commercial releases that used such technique so we could all listen and learn.

[Fleaman]

Originally Posted by YZ!

XY for me is no good for room miking, at least for drums... it will give a smallish perspective of the kit that can be hard to mix in.

yet more likely to get that mono-mic room impact....at the expense a less wide stereo room.

Giveth and a taketh.

But if you have the mics...lots of nice expensive LD's...lots of nice pres or high-end console inputs and lots of tracks (much easier), then you can mic up a mine field in the room and pick 'n chose during mixing.

[chymer]

I know that a record by a guy called '"Owsley" (self titled) was self -engineered/recorded with 1 mic as a room or overhead and some of the record was mixed by one of the Alge brothers and the drums sound incredible.
I was shocked when I was told (by my friend who knows the drummer "Chris McHugh" on that record). I had been listening to the record for about a year and I had never noticed the drum room/overheads were in mono and then when I realised I was shocked.
The record was nominated for a grammy.
If you get a chance listen to this record, great songs.
Chymer
owsley

[audioloud]

Hi !
this is my first post on this lovely forum !!yi ha!
(yeah who cares...)

Anyway-
The mono room drum track has actually a lot of appeal to me..
Please check out Ronson's latest productions , especially the Amy Winehouse ones .
If you are going for that 60's feel ( or even just jazz) it's fantastic! Just add some good plate verb , compress to taste and it's done. Actually if it's a pop or heavy metal it's gonna be dull, even if there are some recordings by led zeppelin ( can't remember precisly which ones) done with one mic for a MONSTER sound...
Obviously it depends a lot by the room..if you have a horribly sounding one just forget it.
On a Jazz project I remmeber once that even if I had all the separate drum mics under my fingers I prephered to leave just the room ambience mic in the mix .

cheers!


p.s.
..and I think almost every single recording by the Beatles has been done with one single mic
(please correct me if I'm wrong)

[espen askelad]

stereo room + mono overhead is where it's at.

[compasspnt]

So then, a question:

If your room is, say, 20 feet wide, and the drums are at one end, and you want these stereo room microphones in order to sound like it would if you were at the other end of the room listening, would one person have two heads, twenty feet apart, at either side of the room? Or would you and your one head be standing in one place at the back of the room?

I'm not saying that two mono room mics placed apart won't work for a recording/mix, just that it wouldn't sound as if one person were back there listening live.

So let's not pretend that this technique is simulating "reality of two ears." It is an artificial recording techniqu