Recording Drums At Home
Tomorrow, Todor and I will be tracking some drums at his place in Little Italy. His room, actually a converted living room in an apartment, has supplied some my favorite drum sounds as of late. You, too can get amazing drum sounds armed with a small pro tools rig, some mics and a couple of decent preamps! Here’s how we do this shit:
Get Realistic – You are probably not going to get a massively ambient drum sound in an 8×12 bedroom. Listen to your drums in the room, and decide if they sound good before sticking mics everywhere. You should be trying to capture the rooms natural tone, not escape from it. If you don;t already hear what you are going for, record somewhere else. It’s also crucial that your drums are tuned in a way that’s pleasing to your ears (sometimes, that means out of tune, with totally dead heads and a hole in the snare)
The room we track in has 12ft ceilings with some fabric hung to control some of the reflections. there is carpet on the floor and a tiled, empty hallway right next to it. The hallway sounds great, almost like a lacquered chamber. The kits we record are varied, and inevitably, the modern DW kit will sound “modern” and the vintage WFL kit will sound “vintage.” If you can’t embrace the sound of your kit, ditch it, and borrow something decent.
Mic Selection – Like us, most people recording at home don’t really have that many options for mics. We have a few cheap Apex Mics, the 460, a variable pattern large-diaphram tube condenser, the 430 a large-diaphram cardioid condenser, and the 210, a figure-of-eight ribbon. Albini would scoff, but he’s not around so we’ll use them anyways. these will for the basis for our drum sound. we can get a great drum sound with just these mics, but usually they are reinforced by some close mics, usually a Sennheiser 421 or AKG D112 for kick, a 57/58/beta57/beta58 for snare, and ATM Pro 25’s for toms. It’s also fun to add a mic in the hallway for a more ambient room sound.
Positioning - Our three Apex mics are set up in the Glynn Johns fashion: each four feet from the centre of the snare drum, one directly overhead of the snare, another over the floor tom, facing the snare, and one in front of the kick drum aboput 5 feet off the ground and looking at the snare. You can capture a great drum sounds just like this. The kick drum mic will usually hover around the soundhole in the kick, looking at the beater, but it’s sometimes micing the front head of the kick (a condenser or ribbon will usually work better than a dynamic mic in this case)
Preamps / EQs /Compressors – If I had my way, I’d rent an API lunchbox for the close mics and some Neve stuff for overhead and room mics. But budget is usually a main concern, so I’ll put the gold channel on the mic I find most important to the overall sound of the kit, usually the front mic. Usually we rent/borrow a Vintech x81, four channels of Millenia, and a bunch of Art preamps. I tend to leave eq and compression for mix time, but if I compress, it will usually be the front mic, kick, and/or snare. And, speaking of eq, the Slipperman Tutorial has helped me immensely in knowing how and why to eq and compress.
So there you have it. If this sounds overly simple, it’s because it is. While it’s possible to obscure a good sounding kit in a nice room on recording, it’s impossible to rescue a bad sounding kit, or a bad room, or a bad performance into sounding great. If I can do it, so can you.
