12 TIPS FOR BETTER DRUM RECORDING
1. Keep it simple. Learn to get a great sound using a minimum of gear, and then build on your successes from there.
2. See the big picture. The final recorded sound is determined not only by the gear and how you use it, but also by the drummer, the drums, and the recording space. Do what you can to bring out the best in each.
3. Learn the basics of drum tuning, and acquaint yourself with the drum kit's many parts and how they work. To be fully prepared, keep a drum toolkit on hand (see the sidebar “Engineer's [Secret] Drum Toolkit”).
4. Seek out great-sounding rooms to record in — if you don't have a decent drum room, that can make a huge difference in the final sound. Think large rooms, high ceilings, wood floors (churches, art galleries, warehouses).
5. Find the drums' sweet spot in the room. A drum kit will project different tonal balances depending on where it's positioned in a given space. If you're after a great sound, it's worth the effort to suss out the best-sounding location for the drums.
6. Make the drummer comfortable. Much depends on his or her performance.
7. Select microphones by type. Typically, dynamics are used for close-miking kick, snare, and toms (with the largest diaphragm reserved for the kick), and condensers are used for overheads, hi-hats, and assorted percussion. But don't be afraid to buck convention — use what sounds good and works best for the song.
8. Use proper stereo recording techniques. They can not only add a delicious spatial realism to your drum recordings, but a stereo pair can also cover the whole kit sound when you don't have enough close mics to go around.
9. Minimize phase distortion between mics. Use the 3-to-1 rule, but also do test recordings and listen in mono to ensure phase coherence, especially between drum overheads and other mics.
10. Maximize signal-to-noise ratio for each track. With digital, the loudest hits should use up most of the bits; with analog tape, hit it till it hurts, then back off a touch.
11. Angle the mics rather than positioning them so their diaphragms are parallel with drum heads. That can lead to problematic phase interactions caused by reflections between the parallel surfaces.
12. Use your ear, not your eye, to do final mic-position tweaks.
MILKING THE KICK MIC
Where you position the kick mic can make a big difference in the sound that you capture. However, kick drums and kick-drum mics vary so much that it's hard to generalize. You need to get familiar with a mic to accurately predict what it will do in a given situation. Moreover, a different model won't always behave in a similar fashion — it might behave quite differently.
Fig. A: to minimize ill effects of air venting forcefully from the "sound hole," angle the microphone on both the vertical and horizontal planes. The drum pictured here is very resonant, even with all the dampening. Thus, the mic is angled also to aim at the beater-strike area, which increases attack.
Here are a few generalizations. As with any drum, the attack is greatest at the center of the batter head. To increase attack, aim the mic diaphragm more toward where the beater strikes the head. You can also increase attack by moving the mic closer to the batter head, at least up to a point. To increase resonance, turn the mic away from where the beater strikes and more toward the resonant part of the head, or position the mic farther back from the drum, or both.
Kick drums come in three head setups: single headed, double headed (no holes), and double headed with a hole in the front head (perhaps the most common setup). Single-headed bass drums excel at producing a very dry, “thuddy” kick sound. The amount of thud can be fine-tuned by moving the packing material inside the drum. Miking single-headed kick drums is fairly straightforward: start with the mic somewhere between “slightly inside” and “all the way inside” the drum, and tweak from there.
Double-headed kick drums with a hole in the front head present more miking options — a good thing, because they're typically harder to get a great sound from. A good starting point is with the mic diaphragm flush with, or slightly inside of, the hole, tilted so that it looks at the beater-strike area from an angle (see Fig. A). If the mic picks up too much resonance from this position — not uncommon — try taking the mic off the stand and laying it inside the drum (on top of a blanket or whatever) more or less in the middle, with the diaphragm facing the batter head at a slight angle.
If the sound is still boomy, try putting the mic on the other side of the kick drum, next to the pedal. Position the diaphragm so that it looks at the beater-strike area yet minimizes sound coming from the pedal (see Fig. B). This position will greatly reduce resonance and provide a strong, solid attack (although isolation will suffer, naturally). Of course, another alternative is to remove the front head from the drum. However, that might not sit so well with the drummer.
Double-headed kick drums with no hole in the front head leave few options for miking. All you can do is put the mic a few inches in front of the drum, facing the head, and move it around until you find the best position. As with the double-headed-with-hole kick, if the drum sounds too boomy (or lacking in attack) no matter where you position the microphone in front, try miking from the batter side.
Although it's generally best, when miking any drum, to avoid aligning the mic diaphragm parallel with the drum head, on kick drums, you might want to experiment with breaking that rule. With the microphone aimed directly into the batter head at close range (one to three inches), the reflections bouncing between the parallel surfaces, not to mention the sheer force of air, can make for a radically slamming sound. But again, you never know until you try — different mics respond differently in that kind of situation.