Getting drums to sound big, full, and all of the other words we use for excellent sounding drums has got to be one of the toughest jobs in the business. There are mic choices, placement choices, room choices, damping choices, drummer choices, too many choices all of which add variables to the X+Y*Z = Excellent sounding drums equation. In this article I intend to discuss only a couple of these topics, namely mic choice and mic placement.

One of the first decisions you must make when beginning to setup to record drums is how important is a stereo image of the kit, and how do you plan on achieve that image. Spaced pair overheads are a popular choice as well as the M+S setup. I tend to prefer the M+S setup myself as long as a few conditions are met: 1) the room is not too reflective (which can ruin any stereo image), and 2) do I have a nice omni and figure of 8 mic on hand. Given these two conditions I nearly always choose an M+S setup for the ambient mics on a drum kit.

I prefer this setup for numerous reasons. The first is that omni-directional mic have the best bass response of all the polar patterns. Step one of capturing a sound is having a mic that can capture the whole sound. (Note: though these techniques can be used alone, I typically use them in conjunction with close mics as well) That said a good kick mic like a D112 or Beta 52A can capture much of the sound that we are used to hearing from a kick drum on a recording. The thing to consider here is when was the last time you put your head into a kick drum and listened to the drummer play. Hopefully your answer was never because doing so could be very detrimental to you health. Needless to say most sounds need both time and space to mature, and because we don’t stick our heads in bass drums we are naturally used to hearing a mature kick sound. Now the trick becomes finding where this mature sound is most pronounced and then place a microphone that is capable of capturing it there.

This will often make people point out something like “Hey, if we put the omni there we have to put the bi-directional there as well.” and I will respond with something like “So?” Most people don’t like my answer and try to explain to me why it is a horrible decision to place the figure of 8 that low and most of their arguments stem from some kind of “Well what about the cymbals” thing. More often than not the drummer does not have a separate set of cymbals for the studio, this means that the same loud and ringy cymbals that he uses live are the ones he/she is using in the studio. When was the last time you reached to turn up the cymbals in the mix. Most times I’m struggling to get the cymbals out of the some of the close mics because they are too loud. Case and point you don’t put your ears over the cymbals like traditional overheads, and when seeing a live show the drum kit is almost always elevated so the mic is actually closer to where your ears would be at a live show down there.

Here is the problem anytime you use close micing and distant micing at the same time you will encounter the natural phenomenon sometime know as “undesirable number one” in recording, Phase. In the past phase was a much bigger pain in the ass than it is to day with the non-linear editing capabilities of digital audio. By moving the the distant mics ever so slightly earlier in the timeline of your DAW you can eliminate some or much of you phase problem. Notice I said much and some, in a 2D world this would be much less complicated, but that third dimension adds all kinds of new reflections to our recording environment, meaning you never get perfect in-phase signals from two mics. You can get a rough estimate by measuring the distance from the source (kick drum) and knowing the fact in the typical earth environment sound travels at (1124 ft/s, or 344 m/s) so your time would be your distance divided by 1124 or 344 depending on your measurement system. Always good to back this up with a careful listen, you could even solo or route the two signals you are trying to match through a phase meter and bump/nudge the distant mic earlier in the timeline until the best phase is achieved.

This technique can be used to on any distant mic in any situation close and distant micing a guitar amp for example, to try an improve phase results. You could even use the inside kick mic as the reference for your entire kit and move all of the other tracks earlier in time according to their distances from the kick mic.