Back in July, I wrote a series of posts about recording drums. Now that it’s practically September, I thought I’d compile a list of these posts here, as an easy access “table of contents” of sorts. The idea behind each one of these “recording drums” posts is to share my simplistic, quick, phase-accurate, and easy to mix approach. Less is more.

The #1 Best Drum Miking Technique

Recording A Kick Drum

Recording A Kick Drum: Mic Selection

Recording Snare

Recording Snare: Mic Selection

Recording Drum Overheads

Recording Drum Overheads: Mic Selection

Recording Toms

Recording Toms: Mic Selection

Recording A Hi-Hat

Recording A Hi-Hat: Mic Selection

Recording Drum Room Ambience

Recording Drum Room Ambience: Mic Selection

Bonus: I actually wrote this post in August, but as it’s about percussion, I threw it in with this list. Using Household Objects As Percussion Instruments

Recording can get over-complicated way too fast. Especially recording drums. That’s when fidelity and performance captured in those recordings suffers. By keeping your recording setup as simple as possible, in a kind of ironic way, is usually when you create an environment where things actually end up sound big, punchy, full of life – creating a soundscape that is made up of multiple complex layers. Less is more.

Thanks for reading. Hope you’ve not only gotten something out of Producer Notes this August, but also enjoyed reading the blog.

//Jon
Website: jonstinson.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/stnsn
Twitter: @stsn

This is where things get creative, and where you should take the most liberties to experiment. Treat your room mics as the “wild card” of sorts for your drum setup and sound. Have a bit of fun.

I’ve taken all kinds of approaches to setting up mics to capture a room sound-stero mics, mics I treat as multi-mono, playing around with a combination of distant and far… It really all depends on the overall sound you’re going for.

If you’re looking for a really dry and tight sound, then you may want to use only one or two mics, placing them a little bit closer to the kit, and recording/blending them low in the mix (or don’t use any room mics at all). On the other hand, if you want to create a bigger sound, then placing a couple mics a bit further from the kit, and angled in such a way as to pick up mostly the ambient sound of the room is the best approach.

Play around with different ideas. Take the opportunity to experiment. I experiment with a slightly different room miking technique on pretty much every project I produce. I may end up changing some things around, but I always learn something from the experimentation process.

Here’s a few suggestions to get you started:

• A spaced pair across the room (6 or more feet away) in cardiod polar pattern (or even omni) – This is good for a bigger drum sound
• A mono mic in omni polar pattern placed directly in front of the kit, about 3 to 6 feet away, and 3 to 5 feet in hight – Good for adding ambience that fits right “behind” the kit in the mix, and adding a bit of “ooph” and presence to the kit just a bit.
• A mismatched pair of mono rooms – two completely different room mics, such as a condenser mic and a ribbon mic, placed in uneven distances/positions from each other. For example, one mic slightly more on the hi-hat side of the kit, about waist high and 3 to 4 feet in distance. Another mic more on the ride side of the kit about as high as your head, and 5 to 6 feet away from the kit.
• A mono mic behind the drummer
• Any combination of all of the above
• Don’t do any of the above – Check the post I wrote on that a while ago: Creating Drum Ambience With No Room Mics.

Just remember how phase plays into the equation-the more microphones you use, the more chance for phase issues. And phase issues=a less focused, lower quality sound. With room mics, a little goes a long way. Typically, two mics is the most you will ever need. If you want to experiment with more, go for it, but just keep your phase in check.

Just jumping into this “drum recording” discussion? Check out my previous posts on the topic:

The #1 Best Drum Miking Technique

Recording A Kick Drum

Recording A Kick Drum: Mic Selection

Recording Snare

Recording Snare: Mic Selection

Recording Drum Overheads

Recording Drum Overheads: Mic Selection

Recording Toms

Recording Toms: Mic Selection

Recording A Hi-Hat

Recording A Hi-Hat: Mic Selection

//Jon
Twitter: @stsn

As the flow of this “recording drums discussion” is obvious at this point, and I’m clearly making my way around the kit, I’m going to keep this post super short by getting straight to the matter.

Here’s the microphones I know to have worked well for people (myself included) when recording toms:

• Shure SM 57-Is that any surprise at all?
• Sennheiser 421
• Sennheiser e604
• AKG 414′s-again, the now discontinued versions with the CK12 or nylon CK12 capsules are ideal
• Audio-Technica 4033
• Electro Voice RE20

For what it’s worth, the mics I keep going back to for getting the drums to tape (or disk) are:

Rack Tom: often times if there is only one rack tom I simply won’t put a mic on it, but allow for the overhead mic to capture it. Otherwise, I most often use a 57 or 421.

Floor Tom: These days I’m pretty consistent in going with a 4033.

And yeah, I’m going to reiterate my point about not rushing out to buy these mics. Try them first. Otherwise you’re spending money on gear just to have gear, and not legitimately investing in a tool for recording. The only exception would be if you go buy a couple 57′s.

Just jumping into this drum recording discussion? Here’s my previous posts on the subject:
The #1 Best Drum Miking Technique
Recording A Kick Drum
Recording A Kick Drum: Mic Selection
Recording Snare
Recording Snare: Mic Selection
Recording Drum Overheads
Recording Drum Overheads: Mic Selection
Recording Toms

//Jon
Twitter: @stsn

When talking about recording toms, it’s probably not really necessary to yet again make mention of my “use only one mic” M.O. There was a time when miking the top and bottom heads of toms was popular, but it’s not quite as common these days. In any case, using only one mic is indeed the way to go. As is placing the mic just like the great engineers who came before us do. It works.

Tuning
Most of the work in getting a good tom sound is actually in the tuning and dampening of the drum-not necessarily the miking (as a matter of fact, this is true in recording the entire kit). No mic placement can make a badly tuned drum sound good.

I recently came across a great video on tuning toms via the Audio Geek Zine blog: Tuning Drums Part One-Basics (from Spectre sound). Don’t be thrown off by the hard rock/metal aesthetic of the video. Their tips for tuning toms can and should be applied to all styles of music.

Once you get the drum properly in tune, put some gaffer’s tape or moon gels around the rim of the tom in various places to suppress the pitch and ring a bit. I usually don’t like to have any pitch or ring present in the tone of the drums-especially the toms. If you really want to suppress the pitch (like me), try placing some gaffer’s tape in an “X” in the center of both the top and bottoms heads.

Miking
For rack toms, placing the mic a few inches from the head, at the 12 o’clock position (from the drummer’s perspective), and angled towards the center typically does the trick. Placing the mic around the 1 or 2 o’clock positions (again, from the drummer’s perspective), a few inches off the head, and angled towards the center is ordinarily where you will find the sweet spot for floor toms. Also, tucking the mic underneath the ride cymbal, and aiming the mic such that the polar pattern rejects as much of the cymbal as possible helps in taming ride cymbal bleed into the floor tom mic.

Synopsis of recording toms:

• Getting a great sound has more to do with the tuning and dampening than mic placement.
• Tuning is a must. Dampening-to a degree-is a preference.
• Once the tuning and dampening is taken care of, placing the mic is a pretty straightforward (go back to the previous paragraph for advise).

//Jon
Twitter: @stsn

[I was aiming to post every day this week, but alas I've been in crisis mode since Monday. I'm Back from a fatal hard drive crash that nearly took me completely out this week. I got REALLY lucky-I recovered nearly all my files. In any case, below is the post I had planned to publish on Monday...]

If you’ve been reading my recent posts over the last couple weeks about recording individual parts of the drum kit, then I bet you can guess what I’m going to say about recording drum overheads…

The best approach to capturing a great, well-balanced overhead sound is the most simple, quickest to set up, and phase friendly miking method. You guessed it, this means using only one mic.

This mono approach to capturing a drum overhead sound I learned all about from a great friend and mentor, who is a very talented engineer. It took me a while to warm up to the idea of using only one mic to capture the overhead sound of the kit, but once I tried it and really dug in, I was very pleased with the outcome.

As I’ve explained before, the less mics you have on a source, the less phase issues you come up against. And the less phase issues there are, the more hi-fi the sound of your recordings. You can’t be any more phase accurate than one single mic.

From a mixing standpoint, using just one mono overhead, condenses and centers the kit within the overall mix of the track. When placed directly in the center of the stereo spectrum this way, the drums are set up to have a nice punchy impact that supports the mix in a natural way. It’s kind of like the primary pillar of a an architectural structure that supports the whole building.

Additionally, a mono overhead simplifies the aspect of recording the cymbals. An interesting observation that my mentor pointed out is that when you record drums with multiple overhead mics, often the cymbals can cause momentary phase-like anomalies that sound a bit ugly. Using one overhead eliminates this, as there’s no chance for timing discrepancies between multiple overhead mics.

So here’s what I recommend:

Start with one well-placed mic centered over the twelve o’clock and six o’clock positions of the snare and rack tom respectively (from the drummers viewpoint), and anywhere from one to five feet in hight over the kit. This gives you a balanced sound from all the elements of the kit in relation to the cymbals. Next, listen and adjust depending on certain specific factors, such as the player, the style of music, and the aesthetic of the band and song. The initial placement should get you 90 percent there, and the adjustments you make after listening will fine tune your sound the rest of the way.

But what about the stereo image of the drums? If you’re worried about sacrificing the stereo image of the drum kit on account of this mono overhead approach, here’s a couple things to consider:

• You can rely on other mics, such as a hi-hat mic, tom mics, and/or room mics to create the stereo image of the kit
• Are mono drums really that bad? A lot of great recordings-both new and old-have mono drums

So that’s my favorite approach to recording drum overheads. I certainly still employ other overhead techniques from time-to-time, but this mono overhead technique has indeed done me well. Give it a try sometime. I bet, just as I was, you will be pleased with your result.

//Jon
Twitter: @stsn

So are you starting to see a pattern form here? The last handful of posts I’ve published about recording kick and snare, have been based on two main ideas: A) keep it super simple, and B) do what’s proven to work-don’t waste time attempting to “fix” a technique that is not broken.

So continuing in that line of thinking, there’s a few mics that are ubiquitous to the application of recording a snare drum. They are ubiquitous because they do the job extremely well.

Here’s what I’ve seen work well for people (myself included):

• Shure SM 57: Ultra ubiquitous!. Chances are pretty good that the awesome snare sound on your favorite album was recorded with a 57
• AKG 451
• Shure Beta 56
• Shure SM7
• Shure SM58 Jack White said he used this for everything when recording De Stijl

Again, most the mics on this list are extremely common (I’ll refrain from using the word “ubiquitous” yet again). And while a few of them are not what I would consider necessarily cheap, there’s definitely a couple-the 57, and 58-that are cheap. So what that means is that either you already own one or two of them, or you know someone who does.

In reality, when aiming to capture a great snare sound, you’re simply not going to need something besides a 57. And considering how popular and inexpensive that mic is, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ve got access to one of those right now.

But as I said before when making suggestions for kick drum mics, don’t read this and then rush out to buy these mics (unless it’s the cheap 57). There’s no point in doing that when they’re so easy to gain access to otherwise. Borrow one, rent one, or book some studio time (where you will get access to all their mics). Once you find yourself going back to a particular mic again and again (I bet it will be the 57), then consider buying it.

Have a great weekend!

//Jon
Twitter: @stsn

At my studio I often run into a problem when recording: I run out of resources.

I prefer to record all basic tracks live with the whole band, and often times this approach to recording leads me to run out of resources-mics, cables, mic pre’s, inputs, etc.

Although this really only becomes a problem when I’m recording five or more people at once, it happens often enough that I find myself having to work inside this challenge on most sessions where basic tracks are recorded at my studio.

My philosophy on recording allows me to approach a limitation, such as the one described above, as a catalyst for creativity, instead of viewing it as a disadvantage. I believe working within certain limitations causes you to make commitments on the spot, which in the end puts a more organic and natural feel on the character of the recording.

When I’m faced with the challenge of having to pick priorities for what mic will get used where, one of the first candidates for omission are the room mics. The reason I’m so quick to lose the room mics, is because I’ve developed a little mixing technique that allows me to recreate the room ambience in a very natural sounding way, which I will describe below.

Artificially Recreating Natural Sounding Ambience

1. Assign all your drum tracks to a stereo buss.
2. In your DAW create two Aux Inputs, and assign both of their inputs to the same stereo buss. Name the first Aux Input “Dry,” and the second Aux Input “Wet.”
3. On the “Wet” channel, insert a reverb plugin. I prefer to use a convolution reverb, because a sampled room sounds so much more natural than a totally synthetic reverb.
4. Turn the “Dry” channel up to 0dB, but leave the fader on the “Wet” channel all the way down for now.
5. Take just a few minutes to balance your drums while listening through the “Dry” channel. Don’t spend too much time on this initial balance, as you will fine tune it in a moment. Simply get the basic pan/level balance that feels right to you.
6. Once you’re happy with the basic drum mix, pull up the “Wet” channel to a good audible level. You may want to bring down the “Dry” channel just a little bit. You want the “Wet” channel a bit louder than it will be in the final mix for now. At this point you are not trying to get the final balance, you’re trying to get a sense for how the reverb sounds.
7. Spend a few minutes dialing in the settings on your reverb plugin. In most cases you will want to find a sound that most closely resembles room mics set up to capture a whole drum kit or band. However, some projects may call for something different. Use your judgement to determine what sounds best in the context of the mix you are working on.
8. After you have finished dialing in the settings on your reverb plugin, you should now begin focusing on the balance of the “Wet” channel against the “Dry” channel. As you balance these two channels together, you may find that you want to fine tune the balance and pan of the individual drum tracks from step five.

That’s it! Once you’re happy with the overall balance/pan of the individual drum tracks, and the “Wet” Aux Input channel with the “Dry” Aux Input channel, you should have a drum mix that includes some natural sounding ambience. Experiment with including or excluding certain drum tracks from the submix, such as overhead mics.

You can take this a few steps further by taking this entire submix, and incorporating the buss compression technique, or adding a bit more reverb of a different type to just the snare drum. You can also use this technique on something else entirely, such as an electric guitar submix, or a horn section submix.

Hope this little mixing tip helps you achieve a natural sounding ambience to your mixes when you don’t have the resources to record with room mics. As always comments are welcome. If you end up using this technique, post a link so we can all hear your mix.

//Jon
Website: jonstinson.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/stnsn
Twitter: @stsn