Recording Recipes: Drums

[Jared Kubokawa]

I thought a helpful thread would be for everyone to share their "recipes" for recording. To see what engineers are cooking up out there in the studios. Since drums are probably the most difficult and varied instrument as far as recording techniques go, this should be an interesting place to start. Who knows? Maybe we'll put out a cook book someday. Has to be better than a book by prison bull Stewart, or the BAM! man. Anyways...

Here's my recipe I like to call "Tasty Low Reasonance in the Kit"
0. Has to be a drum iso booth, no other instruments in the room. Zero, nada.

1. Put your kick mic just inside the port, where the port would be, or a touch off the resonant head if there's no port, per usual.

2. Put another punchier dynamic mic, or pair of mics (X-Y position), about 3 feet in front of the kick drum and a foot or so off the floor (experiment for yourself), horizontal with the middle of the kick. Even 57's will do, any decent dynamics. Tip: Don't use condensers because they pick up the highs on the cymbals too well. We are capturing low resonance here.

3. Record, record, record, experimenting with distance, and phasing. Hint: Don't forget to mic the rest of the kit! Including a mic on the resonant snare head. Come'on, seriously, do it.

4. Now go to mix mode and solo those dynamics out front: boost those low mids, take down the dirty highs they picked up, pan if you want. Or just EQ it any which way is necessary. Listen to only those two mics, listen good. Then cut those and listen to your regular overheads. What a difference in the frequency capture spectrum!

5. Then mute everything again and solo the regular kick mic (whatever you use) and compress it, eq it, or do what you need to do. Get it to sound how you want.

6. Then open up those dynamics out front and blend them with your kick mic. Listen to that kick drum come alive. Listen to those toms. If it sounds too "live" for you, mix in some more of the close (regular) mics. Then bring in the OH's and all the mics mixing as normal.

7. Enjoy with a fine chilled wine.

This recipe works nice (I believe) because it captures the whole kit with a leaning towards boosting the lows and low mids, as well as it adds some definition and character to the kit, not just "punch" or "clean."

Afterall, think about where the audience stands at a show, where the other band members stand, where the engineer stands: out front of the kit (maybe not a foot off the ground, but hey, not above it or an inch off the beater either).

You have to think about recording drums in two ways, first is that each drum is an individual instrument and second that the kit itself is an instrument of its own. I'm unsatisfied with the low frequency capture of two overheads condensers, even expensive ones, they don't grab those lows like a dynamic on reel tape. And if you boost your lows in the OH's, you no longer have a nice "snap" in the snare. Everything effects everything.

Lastly, the key ingredient in any recording is good musicians, especially drummers. You could record a great band on a blade of grass...

Good luck, and please share your recipes. Don't forget the wine.

[dagosto]

I'm a close mic sort of guy. I really like the tight seventies sound when it comes to drums. One thing I find that helps the sound get really authentic is to distort certain mics on the set.

Lately I've been using this old SoundTech board with busted outputs as a bank of 16 pres. I run the toms and the snare bottom through 3-4 channels of the board. To get to my interface I use the insert as a direct out by plugging a 1/4" TS halfway into the insert jack. On my interface I set the inputs to +4 but since I am feeding out of an unbalanced source there is an impedance mis-match. When I have it set up like this I can run the toms and bottom snare really hot on the pres without distorting the inputs on my interface. So basically I'm just adding some nice pre distortion to the bottom snare mic and the toms. It really makes the fills punch through and delivers the sound I am looking for most of the time.

Of course I wouldn't do this with a Mackie. You need decent pres to distort nicely. I recommend something British and possibly 30 years old if possible. It seems these days that mixer pres sound a lot more clinical than nice and warm. There's a little bit of magic in this old live board that I got as a trade for recording services. Of course it is a SOB to pull out just to use a few channels of pres, but I'll still do it on special sessions.

Nice idea Jared. I like the idea of sharing "recipes" on here. I must say though that I prefer a beer while tracking drums.

[Nubus]

Start with the basics, 1 large snare drum, 2 regular sticks.
Add the stick to the drum vigorously, whisk briskly.
Is the snare made out of wood? Point the microphone at the side of the shell. The result should sound like a deep natural taste to your tongue similar to a fine mushroom or the freshest deep sea deliciousness.
Serves two.

[Jared Kubokawa]

Hey Nubus, your Snare Umami sounds yummy. Try my strange kick beater recipe if you like. It's quite delicious:

To fix up those old mushy kick heads and soft bass drum beaters, rather than using a plastic or wood beater (which changes the "play" of the pedal and can lead to lots of unintended ghost notes), use a thin strip of tape (duct or stage) to fix a dime to the face of the beater. You can smash FDR's face for fun, or turn him over, no difference. This gets more attack without changing the play or balance of the pedal, and it can salvage a bass drum sound. Attack, attack, attack for 10 measly cents. Dimebag loves this one.

[Nubus]

Dan I never tried your mismatch method to drive the pre more but I do feed the fader too hot and pull the level back to acceptable there. Kinda the same thing but I guess a little more controlabable.

[SorenP]

Wanna fake a huge deep kick drum with a drum thats not? Try this. Looks a little ghetto, but works like a charm.

Take a big long piece of cardboard and fold it into a tunnel and place it against your kick with the head off. You can get the same effect with a real heavy blanket propped up by a piano bench or somethin like that. Basically just make a big bass tunnel, then put your mic at the beginning of the tunnel and slowly move it backward until you get to the sweet spot in the tunnel. If you have someone monitoring, they'll know when it gets there. You'll have to cut at 250Hz a little more than usual, but you can make a small cheap kick sound huge and deep.
Beyer M88 is great for this in particular, along with all the usual nice ones.

[Jared Kubokawa]

Hey SorenP, that reminds of this effect: Cramming a cheap mic into a pipe (PVC or whatever) for hollow, nasal distorted guitar sounds, and facing the pipe at a kick gets a tone that’s useful too.

I've never actually done it but it sounds purrrrrty neat, try it on an amp too.

[Nubus]

I've had the drum kit in the living room for the past few weekends and added a mic in the bedroom next door with the door closed. One in the office down the hall and we got our selves a salty room track.

[SorenP]

yeah we did the next-room mic stuff a few times in college.. cool sound for sure.

I love that PVC thing I gotta try that.

[SorenP]

heh, this thread has me digging through my note books from college.

Another thing to explore for a more roomy sounds is placing a stereo pair of mics where the drummers ears are. We found that small/medium condensers work better than big ones. 414s or Oktava 012s were what we used, the large ones were too much information for what we were trying to do. Just pan em hard left and right and you get a cool drummer's point of view stereo image that captures most of your drumset. This worked great for some monster rockstar drumset we were doing, this drummer brought a set with 9 toms and we just didn't have the time to mic up everything individually. Obviously if you need a close-mic tom sorta sound this isn't gonna work great for you, but anything a little roomier it's a great way to save channels and mics or just a different drum sound to check out.