Recording Live Drums

Tyler_Kitchens

Hello!

I’ll be recording live drums on a score for an upcoming film next year and wanted to get an insight on miking a kit. (ex: types of mic’s, mic setup/placement)

It will more than likely be a standard 5-piece kit.

Any info/tips would be a huge help.

Thank you!

-Tyler

Angus

@Tyler_Kitchens this article is a must-read:

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/studio-sos-drum-recording

Tyler_Kitchens

@Angus Thanks! I’ll check this out👍🏻

Hidde

Now I'm no expert on miking stuff (yet), but I do happen to be taking various courses on the inner workings of mics and their use, as well as general studio acoustics.

One thing my professor keeps hammering home to us is that, with any mix, you want as little mics as possible. Adding mics is an exponential puzzle; every additional mic adds exponentially more problems. Things like crosstalk, phase, weird stereo images. Ideally, you'd need only one mic to do any recording (and there actually is a studio engineer, John Cuniberti, who's done an entire series of live recordings of bands using a single mic https://www.youtube.com/c/OneMictheminimalistrecordingseries/featured).

The general principle behind multiple mics, especially with close-miking drums, is mainly to fill in details. A good overhead will often do 80-90% of the work, whilst the other mics, like the kick and snare mics, are just there to fill in the details where needed.

So long story short, keep it simple. Make sure your overhead is solid, and the rest is just tweaking the details.

As a little side note, ribbons, and figure-8's in general, make for quite nice overheads, though cardioids are always a solid choice as well. Just try to steer clear of mics like Shure SM57s for overheads, as their reliance on the proximity effect makes them quite poor choices when placed even a bit further away from the source

Tyler_Kitchens

@Hidde Thank you! I'll keep that all in mind and I'll check out this channel.