Drum Overhead mic placement preference

[audioslave]

What's your fav go-to setup when setting up drum overheads.


John

[Ahellam]

spaced pair for hard rock , metal and pop
recorder man for indie and classic rock

thats all i usually record.
either way I always make sure theyre equal distance from the snare

[Jay Kahrs]

Usually small diaphram condensors in a spaced pair or OTRF setup.

Sometimes I use LDC's and sometimes it's a mono overhead...sometimes a ribbon mic like a 77DX or SF-12.

What's in the mic locker and what's the kit sound like? What do we want the kit to sound like?

[Shawn1272]

Depends on the drummer, style of music, and whatever mood I'm in that day. But I like to try new overhead setups all the time. Some of the setups I use a lot are:

ORTF
X-Y
spaced pair
"Glyn Johns" technique
mono overhead
over the shoulder mono mic
Blumlien (excellent with my Coles)
I've done an M-S setup before but not for a long time.

shawn

[KBOY]

Pretty consistently the Recorderman setup. Just like it!

[lm66]

Small condensers (Schoeps CMC6/MK4) XY or ORTF work fine for me in most of the cases.

[justinhedrick]

what is the ORTF or the "recorder man" setup? I like to put a pair spaced out front, one looking at the left side of the drum kit and one looking at the right. I try not to get alot of high hat in either......what would you call that?

[Jay Kahrs]

Originally Posted by justinhedrick

what is the ORTF or the "recorder man" setup? I like to put a pair spaced out front, one looking at the left side of the drum kit and one looking at the right. I try not to get alot of high hat in either......what would you call that?

What your doing is called a spaced pair.

ORTF is a stereo miking setup, not unlike XY or MS. Go and search. Read. Learn.

The "recorderman" setup is from a guy who posts under the name 'recorderman' who has a specific way of measuring and placing the microphones. At one point he described it in detail, probably a lot of other people have too. It works pretty well for a quickie default stereo setup but I've found that I need to spend a lot of time tweaking the placement once I get mics roughed in.

[DirkB]

ORTF with stereo matched pair SDC's.

Perfect compromise between phase coherency and stereo width.
X-Y is often too narrow for me.
However, I have no problem panning the ORTF mic's a little to the center when mixing... In fact in the mix I rarely have them hard L/R.

Greetings,
Dirk

[84K]

4038s spaced in accordance with balance. No gospel. Just get it how I like it... Snare and kick in the center when the tracks are panned hard L-R. Try to get a nice mixture of the snare and the cymbals. Centering the kick and snare is the key.

[cfjis]

Spaced pair with TC30K's... and the occasional Center OH, depending on how many cymbals the drummer's got.

[kwhatx]

Spaced pair using SDC mics with snare centered in image is first choice. After that, I'll try ORTF or XY. Might substitute LDC's depending on mic locker, room, and what type of sound we are going for.

[joaquin]

LDC in ORTF..........small room...I think I benefit from this configuration and prefer it over XY. Great stereo Image in my actual Room.

[Dog_Chao_Chao]

i am curious also. What the hell is a recorder man ? I thought i heard about every technique....GS=Geek School? Also i can see that many of you don´t hard pan the Oh...don´t you have a narrow stereo image like that? I am sure going to try it...I think i have the oposite thinking: i hard pan them and then, in the stereo drum bus, i often use a s1-imager to open even more the stereo....Am i ****ing the overall phase here? I like the way it sounds...

[Youn]

Recorderman posted the techinque on another forum, not "his" technique mind you... basically it's just having both mics equal distance to snare AND kick drum (where the beeter hits the skin). One mic about two drum sticks or more above center of snare and the other mic ussually ends up near the drummers right shoulder (if he's a right hander).

[Dog_Chao_Chao]

Thanks Youn. So the mics get pretty low...hum, i guess it could be tricky with a very expressive drummer...no? but its sill a spaced a / b only lower..right?

[warhead]

Near coincident, usually about 18" over the head facing into the kit...spaced about as wide as a human head...angles are dependent on the kit but typically around 100 to 110 degrees...essentially I start with ORTF and work it around a bit.

I like LDC's for drum overheads many times, but go between SDC as well.

That's my "go to" anyhow, gives good image most times and hears what the player hears for the most part. Centered snare doesn't matter quite as much as a typical spaced pair setup.

War

[Fredrik]

Are there any good readingmaterial concerning this that any of you would suggest?


(Prefferably with some nice graphics aswell)

[Jay Kahrs]

For those of you doing the 'recorderman' setup, how are you panning?

I've found that unless I spend hours (probably about 30 minutes lol) aiming the mics the snare is always about 4-6dB louder on the left side, left being the hat side, the mic directly over the snare. I usually don't obsess over having the snare "perfectly" centered but it's enough to drive me up a wall. Even at best, it's still a good 2dB louder then the other mic.

[Youn]

You should be able to pan hard left/right and still have the kick and snare dead-on-balls centered. It takes me at most a couple minutes getting the balance correct (maybe more the very first time)

If you are getting one side with more snare, look at your room, the sound may be bouncing off of something nearby. I've had to move the whole drumset a couple feet away from walls. If I were in a bigger room, I might try to setup so any reflections occur equally on both sides.

Hope that helps. BTW double check that you are using matched pairs with equal amounts of gain applied. I've made that mistake a couple times.

Lastly, "aiming" isn't as important in getting things centered. I often have the mics pointing towards toms, or in one case almost sideways towards the wall. If the distances are equal, it should be centered.