Recording Drums with 2 Inputs

[beyondimpact]

I have a M-Audio FastTrack USB with 1 mic preamp and an instrument/line-in. I run my behringer xenyx 1202FX mixer into the line in. What would be the best method of recording a full drum set into pro tools with this limited seteup?

[Sensual Ears]

search: recorderman

thumbsup

[biggator6]

yup... recorderman or glyn johns.

[Nutmeg II.]

with 5 mic pres you aren'tt to limited at all.
Just make sure to have a great downmix.

The other 2 are right, if the drummers intern balance is good.

[beyondimpact]

Thanks. Which mic would be the best one to run directly into pro tools on its own track.

[joeq]

Originally Posted by beyondimpact

Thanks. Which mic would be the best one to run directly into pro tools on its own track.

if you get your drum mix right you can just do a nice stereo mix of the whole kit onto two tracks. Take your 5 mics and blend and pan them how you want on to the 2 tracks you have available. The problem is that "right" means right in the context of your final mix. You will need to experiment (and screw up) in order to get this balance correct, it will rarely be at the same point where the drums sound balanced all by themselves.

For example, my experience taught me that if I mixed in a bit more kick drum than I thought it "ought" to have, I was later glad I did. YMMV. You may want to EQ certain mics, or put reverb on them because once they are mixed with the other signals they can not be independently effected.


If you run one mic directly to it's own track to isolate stuff, you could split out either the kick or the snare. This would give you some "control" for volume and EQ, (and reverb) but it makes your drums mono (Not That There's Anything Wrong With That) and it still forces you to make balancing decisions with the 4 mics within the remaining track.

your bottleneck is the amount of inputs to the Mbox, not the amount of tracks you can use for drums, so other tricks you could try would be to record just the beat, say kick and snare on 2 separate tracks (let some Hi hat bleed on the snare mic) then go back and do tom fills on another pass, and maybe one more time for cymbal crashes

[Goliath|Audio]

You may also want to concider finding a friend with a drum module so you can grab midi triggers as well. You can do quite a bit more if you have that.

[Nutmeg II.]

Originally Posted by beyondimpact

Thanks. Which mic would be the best one to run directly into pro tools on its own track.

Dude you are ****ed!
Recordin in Nuendo or Logic would enable you to use SM57s all over the kit, but with ProTools you got to go and buy several Josephson S22 to get any result of quality!














Kidding! Kidding! Kidding!


If your room is ok sounding you should get a pair of condenser mics for the OH and some Dynamic mics for the drums.
Wile the OH, kick and snare mic should be of quality the tom mics could be of lesser.

Please use the forums search to find 10,093 threads on "Best drum mics under 200$".