Beating like a Drum

Here's the first mix after we recorded the drums last Wednesday. I don't know what to think of it since I spent too much time tweaking and my ears are tired. It sounds perhaps too bright to me, there's too much cymbals but I refrained from reaching for the EQ for changing the overall sound of the drums at all. We were supposed to record in a much larger room, the same one where we first recorded the rehearsal, but it wasn't available this time. Pity because I really liked the sound of it. I had planned to do between 9-12 takes using different mic positions, and recording three takes for each:

1) M/S recording with fig-8 + cardioid mics as overheads, but angled at 45 degrees in front of the drum kit, pointing directly to the snare. I predicted that we would probably pick up a little bit too much of the front tom than we would like, but if I had placed the mics directly above the kit using the same M/S arrangement, I'd get no kick and perhaps too much of the beater/pedal mechanical noises. The way both crashes and ride sounded was more pleasant to my ear from that spot than from directly above. With only two microphones and a stereo recorder, this was my preferred approach so we recorded this way first, knowing that it was a question of what to compromise, as usually is. We ended up using the third M/S take on the final mix.


2) AB overheads. The problem with this is that my mics aren't matched, nor they are identical, so the stereo image would end up being all over the place. The advantage is that you get a drier sound than with M/S, but mono compatibility can easily be compromised if you're not careful when the Left and Right signals are summed if they're out of phase. I tried this as an experiment and was surprised to see that the end result wasn't as bad as I expected, and there was plenty of vintage snare in it but with crap imaging, as I had placed the mics too far apart resulting in an extremely wide and unfocused stereo image. I thought that the sound worked very well if you were listening to the drums in isolation, but didn't work well for the entire song with the remaining instruments in.

3) Mono recording with single mic in front of the kit and second mic capturing the room sound. I didn't even give this one a go, because the room we got in the end was simply too small and shit-sounding. I decided we would use the time we had left for recording every piece of the kit separately just in case there would be any need to fix or reinforce anything later with some sound replacing or blending.



Here's a couple of pics showing a typical M/S setup with a cardioid mic at the top pointing to the sound source and the figure-of-eight mic at the bottom picking up the sides. You later duplicate the track corresponding to the recorded signal of the bottom mic, and invert it. Like this if you listen to the three tracks simultaneously in mono, the track you duplicated cancels out the sound of the original track, leaving you with the mono recording you captured through the top microphone. Note that you don't necessarily need to place the figure-of-eight below the cardioid, so long their capsules are aligned like this: