There are a number of different ways of miking a drum kit, each capable of producing great results under the right circumstances. If you are lucky enough to have a brilliant-sounding kit in a fabulous room, you may be able to get a great sound with just a single mic (mono or stereo) placed a few feet in front of the kit. However, in the project studio this happens about as often as a squadron of pigs applying for landing clearance, and for any serious work the bare minimum technique involves a
A good starting point for a kick-drum mic is halfway between the centre and edge of the shell, initially projecting only 50 to 100mm into the drum. Make a few test recordings and then try moving the mic a little until you find the ‘sweet spot’ that combines the right amount of attack and depth.
pair of overheads, panned slightly left and right to give a suitable stereo image width, and augmented with a kick drum mic.
Where other instruments are playing in the same room, you may need to take some measures to help minimise the spill of unwanted sounds into the drum overhead mics. Solutions might include facing guitar amplifiers away from the drum kit, and/or using power soaks to reduce their volume in the room.
Drum overhead mics are typically cardioid-pattern, capacitor models, as these are good at capturing the transient detail of the drum and cymbal sounds, although where spill is not an issue, omni models may give a more open sound. Ribbon mics are also making a comeback in this role, now that more affordable models are available, and being figure-of-eight mics, you can aim their ‘dead’, 90-degree axis at potential sources of spill, whilst using absorbers behind them. Ribbons usually produce a smoother cymbal sound, too.
Drum overheads are usually set up a metre or so above the kit and spaced around one to one-and-a-half metres apart, although you may sometimes get a better balance by bringing the mics slightly forward of the cymbals to prevent the cymbal sound dominating the drums. You can also use coincident (XY) techniques with cardioid mics for overheads, if preferred. As with any spaced mic technique, care should be taken when positioning the mics to minimise phase cancellation problems.
The above guidelines are all very well and good in a large room, but in a typical home studio the overhead mics will also pick up strong reflections from the walls and ceiling, and these can degrade the sound significantly, making it seem boxy and congested. The most practical option in such cases is to try to remove the natural room sound as much as is practical, using acoustic absorbers such as foam or mineral-wool panels suspended above the overhead mics, and on the walls close to the kit (if necessary). Mattresses propped around the walls can also help. If you can keep the overheads sounding reasonably dry, the illusion of a nice drum room can be added back afterwards using a suitable ambience reverb setting – most DAWs come equipped with a reverb plug-in that will do this job adequately. Some of the software convolution reverbs
T I P : If you set the two overhead microphones at exactly the same distance from the snare drum, you’ll ensure that the snare sound doesn’t suffer tonal changes caused by phasing issues if the track is played back in mono.
include libraries of real drum rooms, which can sound very flattering without washing the sound out in obvious reverb, but be warned that even the best reverb won’t hide a nasty room acoustic that has already been captured in the recorded sound due to lack of treatment of the recording room. So your first priority should be keeping as much reflected sound out of the overheads as possible.
The tactic we have used on many Studio SOS visits is to glue foam panels to the ceiling above the overhead mics where this has been permissible, but where gluing is not appropriate we improvise less permanent means of supporting the foam panels such as creating a web of nylon line onto which the foam can be laid, with the nylon cord being attached to hooks screwed into opposite walls. It is also possible to deploy microphone or lighting stands to temporarily hold the absorbing panels just below the ceiling.
Alternatively, ceiling reflections can be eliminated altogether by using boundary mics (sometimes called PZM or Pressure
In a good room, with a really good drummer and a well-tuned kit, you can achieve a perfect balance of all the kit elements with just a kick-drum mic and a pair of overheads. Using fewer mics generally results in a cleaner, less coloured sound.
It’s certainly no substitute for proper acoustic treatment, but shielding the rear of the overhead mics from the higher-frequency components in the ceiling reflection, using these easily mounted foam screens, can still offer a worthwhile improvement.
The ideal drum room, as far as many engineers are concerned, will always have a high ceiling, but if you don’t have that you can make a big difference to the ceiling reflection by suspending absorption above the kit.
Zone Microphones) fixed to the ceiling above the kit, instead of conventional overheads, so if you record a drum kit on a regular basis and in the same place, this option is well worth considering in rooms with typical domestic-height ceilings.
Using the basic, three-mic technique, you can usually achieve a fairly natural drum sound. However, the obvious compromise is that, other than the kick drum, there is no means of balancing the sounds of the individual elements of the drum kit apart from a little bit of leeway afforded by moving the overhead mic positions slightly. The next step is to add a fourth mic to capture the snare drum directly, since that is the next most important element after the kick. If even more control is needed, then the next step is to close mic all the drums individually – and in this case the overheads may sometimes be high-pass filtered to capture just the cymbals, rather than provide the overall kit sound.