Welcome to Day 31 of 31 Days to Better Sounding Drums. Last and certainly not least, I’ve asked microphone guru, Matthew McGlynn to talk a little bit about acoustics and mic placement. Matt writes about microphones at RecordingHacks.com.
You don’t record drums in a vacuum. The microphones around your kit won’t just record the drums, but the room, too.
For any given drummer and drum kit, room acoustics and microphone placement are the two primary levers you can use to improve the sound of your drum tracks.
Room Acoustics
Great drummers and recording engineers know that the room is part of the instrument. Travis described a neat tip for finding a room’s sweet spot. Let’s dig a little deeper into how to understand and use a room’s acoustics for drum recording.
In an untreated (or under-treated) space, such as most home recordists’ project studios, there might not be a “sweet spot.” Typical bedroom studios — with 8′ ceilings, multiple windows, and 90° corners — are very difficult to treat. They suffer from flutter echo and room nodes that can cause significant EQ problems for your overhead tracks. For example, standing waves might cause a 20–30dB difference in frequency response from one overhead mic to the next.
Your best bet for a small room is to make it as dead as possible: load up the corners with absorbent material, the more massive the better. Think couch cushions, mattresses, sleeping bags. Break up parallel reflective surfaces. Treat either the ceiling or the floor, if not both.
No, egg cartons will not help. But if you have 10 friends stand in a circle around the drum kit during each take, that will help. Bring plenty of earplugs. (I’m being somewhat facetious, but the truth is bodies do make pretty good broadband absorbers.)
Better yet, move the drums to a bigger room. Higher ceilings and more-distant walls will dramatically reduce reflections and give you a clearer, bigger sound.
Keep in mind that ambiance can always be added later, whether via room mics or reverb. But it can’t be taken away if it’s printed as part of the track.
Microphone Technique
The close mics on snare, kick, and toms will in general be much less affected by room acoustics than are the overhead and ambient mics, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to audition them. For example, if your kick drum mic ends up in the null of an 80Hz standing wave, it will have a problem that EQ can’t fix.
The height of the overhead mics is one of two primary mechanisms for controlling the amount of ambiance in the track. Lowering the overhead mics is almost like having a fader for “room sound;” the lower the mics, the drier the overhead track.
The other factor is the angle of the overhead mics. Simply put, if the mics point at the drums, they’ll mostly hear drums. If the mics point across the top of the drums and into the room’s corners, they’ll mostly hear the room.
Another tip is keep the overhead mics in the same angle as your cymbals – this will help get rid of the “washy” overtones. – Travis
Imagine an XY pair of overhead mics hung 8′ in the air, roughly 5′ above the snare drum. Unless you’re recording Mike Portnoy or Terry Bozzio, the entire drum kit is going to be inside the 90° spread of the mics, or in other words, off-axis. You’ll get a lot of room ambiance in that track, and not so much direct sound.
Contrast that with the “Recorderman” overhead-mic technique, in which both overhead mics are pointed at the snare drum from just 32” away. The result is a very dry, drum-centric track, with minimal influence from the room.
(Hear and compare five drum overhead mic techniques.)
If you have spare inputs on your DAW, record the room separately. The key is putting ambient mics far away from the drum kit. You’ve probably read stories of people putting mics down the hall, around corners, and so on. This approach sounds offhand, but it’s more calculated than you might think. That is, you still need to audition those tracks. A microphone in the kitchen might seem like a great idea until mix time, when you realize it mostly recorded dishes rattling around inside the cabinets. (No, this never happened to me. Why do you ask?)
Miking the corners of the far end of the room takes advantage of the natural bass-frequency buildup in corners.
Some engineers use a figure-8 mic whose null is pointed at the kit, guaranteeing that the mic picks up only reflected sound.
Others like taping a small-diaphragm omni condenser to the floor in a place where room nodes accentuate low frequencies.
All these tricks can bring depth and power to a drum track, so long as you take the time to identify the mic locations that deliver what you need.
GAS
The risk of GAS is ubiquitous. We all spend time chasing gear, based on the belief that better gear will give us better recordings with less effort.
While there is some truth to that statement, it is critical to remember that fantastic recordings can (and have) been made with basic, even “challenged” equipment. If your budget only allows for a pair of MXL 603 SDCs (street price: $99 apiece) for overheads, then you can still go and make a great record. Just pay attention to the room, the mic placement, and of course Travis’ 30 other tips for great-sounding drums.
Then if time and experience are kind, and you have access to $17,000 worth of ribbon microphones just for use as ambient mics, there’s no reason not to do so:
About the author: Matthew McGlynn writes about microphones at RecordingHacks.com.
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