We started by recording drums. Our drummer, Sid, wasn’t able to play along with the track so a guide bass track was played alongside for him to follow the structure. He also didn’t play with a click track.
We began with setting the drum kit up and making sure the drummer was comfortable. If we’d had more time, we probably would have spent some time tuning the kit, maybe changing drum heads, finding the sweet spots to put dampeners on and using duck tape to fix any rattles on the kit. However, the kit sounded fairly good without any modifications, so we went with it.
We used a total of 7 microphones to record the drums.
Kick – we used the standard akg d112 on the kick drum, as it is a dynamic mic with the capability of withstanding a high amount of volume and the ability to capture the low end frequencies makes it an ideal choice. It was placed within the shell of the kick drum, facing the beater skin, slightly off center so as to avoid the loud volume of the beater head-on. It was roughly in the middle of the drum, so as to pick up some of the snap of the beater and some of the lower bass frequencies. If we had been recording drums in the larger live room, we could have used an additional condenser microphone, placed outside of the kick shell and at a slight distance, to capture more of the low end. Furthermore we could have used a reversed NS10 cone attached onto the outside of the far kick skin, to pick up even more low end frequencies.
Snare – again, we used the standard sm57 on the top and bottom of the snare. being a dynamic mic, the sm57 is ideal for picking up the high volumes so close to a snare drum. We positioned the top one just over the rim of the top, pointing toward the middle of the skin. The second, bottom one, was positioned below the drum, pointing at the snares.
Toms – we used two tom mics, for the main rack mounted toms; we didn’t mic up the floor tom. we used a beyerdynamic m201 on each tom. This is again, a dynamic mic able to handle the high volumes and harsh transients of drums. again, we positioned them just over the rim of the drum, facing down towards the skin.
Overheads – we used a stereo pair of AKG 414’s for our overheads. They were placed equidistant apart over the kit, facing roughly toward the snare. The 414’s were ideal as they are condensers, so they capture the frequency range of the kit, including the high end. We didn’t use a specific hi hat mic, so it helped that the overheads picked up a lot of the high end information.
again, if we had been recording in the live room, we could have used a room mic to capture some of the ambience of the room. This would have been a condenser or a ribbon mic. Drums recorded in large spaces, full of reverb, benefit greatly from a heavily compressed, well placed room mic.
We made sure there were no phase issues between the mics, and we also flipped the phase on the bottom snare mic, in order to retain the low end frequencies.
The drums were recorded easily, taking only 2 attempts. The levels were good, the sound was crisp and clean, and the performance was great. we didn’t use any compression or gating on the tracks, although that would have been something we’d have done if we’d had more time. the drums we recorded didn’t massively call for any outboard effects anyway, as they were pretty strong on their own.