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Real Drum Special - Part 2

Drummers Drumming (Part 7)

Miking Percussion

Article from One Two Testing, April 1985

what to put and where


Tony Bacon wanders round a couple of 8-tracks and says, "How do you mike up drums?" Here are the answers.


If you want to improve your understanding of drums and how to mike them up for recording purposes, then prepare yourself for some experimentation. Take chances, fool around, and brace yourself for mistakes as well as pleasant surprises. Or, as Andy Dalby at Croydon's Cherry studio puts it, "Try things out, because there are no rules. Don't stick to any particular method of doing things — if it sounds good, use it."

Heard that one before? Course you have. Because it happens to be true. All the engineers we spoke to, at the 8-track and 16-track end of the market, had virtually the same message to people fiddling with drums and recording equipment at home or in other small studio set-ups. Find out the hard way. Experiment.

But they didn't leave without imparting some general guidance, you'll be pleased to hear.

The crucial area is that of choice and deployment of microphones. What tips, chaps? Mark Carman at Pet Sounds studio in London bought mainly mid-price-range mikes for miking drums there, the affordable AKG and Shure types. "Go for the best mike you can afford for the snare and for the bass drum, these are the most important ones. Get two good ones for those and some average mikes for the rest to start with. That's a better way of spending your money than spreading out what you spend over all the mikes."

But let's get a little more specific. Archie Hood at Arch studio in Glasgow endorses the mid-price argument, opting for an AKG D12 for bass drum and Shure SM58 for snare — universally acceptable mikes that will give good sounds at reasonable prices. Down in Manchester, Mike Bonwick at Crimson studio specifies condenser mikes for cymbals or snare, and dynamic mikes for toms.

"You can get away with an inexpensive dynamic mike on toms," says Mike, "the AKG D190, say, which you can pick up for about £40, and despite what some people will tell you this gives a quite acceptable sound. But use a dynamic, as opposed to cheap condensers which distort and can be difficult to eq. Get a good condenser for your cymbals — spend a bit more here and you'll get definite returns. Something like a Calrec is a good idea."

Back at Cherry, Andy suggests yet more mid-price mike options that he's tried and tested and found to be good, dependable models: AKG 451s for overheads, Sennheiser 421 "ray-guns" for bass and toms, the inevitable D12 for bass, and the normal array of Shures for snare — 58s, 57s, or 68s. But a good low cost tip from Cherry is Tandy's PZM "plate" mike.

"They're a copy of the Crown mikes which came out about 1976, but they cost only around £20 because they have the Tandy name on them. They're great if you're limited by money or tape tracks. Basically, wherever it sounds good to your ear, the PZM will sound good. We've found them best on a hard surface, for example on the hard side of our drum screens, either side of the kit. A wall is good too — the larger the reflective area around the PZM, the more effective it will be. A lot of people use them for overheads, back-to-back, in the air."

Now there's a thought. Supposing you could only afford two mikes and had to record real drums. What should you do with them? Archie at Arch (geddit?) suggests one up high and one down low, rather than left and right for stereo, to give a bass and treble "height" spread. Mike at Crimson gives an alternative, as he does a fair amount of jazz work in addition to straight-ahead rock.

"For lighter, jazzier work, where the player's more delicate, perhaps even using brushes, I'd go for a crossed-pair on top. But that's not bottomy enough for rock — for that I'd put one mike 'centrally' in the kit, about three feet from the ground in the vicinity of the snare, and another in the bass drum. That set-up can need a fair amount of eq, though, to make sense of — you'd need to drop your mids at about 1k to get rid of some of the scratchiness of the sound. Works, though."

Mark at Pet Sounds agrees with the bass drum and mid-kit arrangement for a two-mike budget: "On a small kit that would cover it well, but you'd start to lose detail on a kit with quite a few toms."

But even more important on a small budget — though it's hardly something to be overlooked wherever you're operating — is to make sure the drums themselves sound OK. You can hardly expect a duff old drum to sound magically clear and punchy just by putting it on tape.

"Even before you start thinking about mikes, try to get the best sound you can from the drums," underlines Archie. "Take the skins off, change them round, turn a few drum keys here and there. If you start dampening the drum, however, by the time you hear it with all the rest of the band it'll die — only the peaks really cut through. So find out the range of the drums you're working with and bear it in mind."

And Mike at Crimson also directs your ears to the drums in question. "Get a good snare — you can't make a bad drum sound good. It actually takes very little work in the studio if the drummer has a good snare, but nine times out of ten we have to use our own Gretsch which we know will sound all right. Young drummers don't know how to set up their drums: one simple suggestion I'd make — I'm not a drummer — would be to check your heads. Old thrashed heads don't do a drum much good. It's really a matter of garbage in, garbage out."

While you've got your ears very near to the drums, notice how they sound... well, undrumlike. What do we learn from this, we ask Andy at Cherry? "It's amazing how horrible a drum can sound an inch from your ear. Remember that fact when you're miking drums up, and try to get the mikes as far from the drums as you practically can."

So the bigger the room, the better for the overall drum sound? Archie thinks so: "If you put drums in a small drum booth it limits the bass end. So put up with some leakage — you can always work ways around that in the recording, anyway, especially if the other instruments are electronically sourced. Put the drums in a big room! You can get an excellent sound with just a few mikes from the natural sound of the kit itself if the room is at all live sounding and doesn't have too many parallel walls."

One last comment on the importance of the physical attributes of the drums whose sound you want to get on to tape. Remember, you can't get something from nothing. As Mark at Pet Sounds points out. "If the player hasn't tuned the bass drum properly for the sound he wants, you're fighting a losing battle. There he is with a boomy bass drum and he's asking you to get a clicky, funky sound. Half the sound at least comes from the drums themselves."

Above all, be intelligent in the company of drums. There are no easy options, no magic buttons to press that'll make everything OK, and no simple formulas for success. And that, we should bear in mind in 1985, is what makes real drums all the more interesting.


Series - "Real Drum Special"

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All parts in this series:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 (Viewing) | Part 8


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Publisher: One Two Testing - IPC Magazines Ltd, Northern & Shell Ltd.

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One Two Testing - Apr 1985

Donated by: Colin Potter

Real Drum Special - Part 2

Topic:

Microphones

Recording


Series:

Real Drum Special

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 (Viewing) | Part 8


Feature by Tony Bacon

Previous article in this issue:

> Drummers Drumming

Next article in this issue:

> Drummers Drumming


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