Drum recording

A modern kit needs about ten microphones#

kick in and kick out, snare top and bottom, toms, a stereo pair of overheads and a stereo pair of room mics.

With an eight-channel interface you have to compromise. You have to skip the toms, or the room mics, or the second kick and snare mics, or you are forced to have a mono overhead and room mic. None of those options are particularly good. ADAT can be used to expand the channel count (see audio interfaces) but it's nice to have an audio interface that can record 10 mics.

One or two mics can be great for a demo, or for an intentionally vintage sound like 60s R&B. But not for modern heavy music.

Use the outside kick mic and key the gate from the inside one#

A mic outside the kick drum often sounds fuller and more balanced. The problem is that it picks up hi-hat, snare and cymbals, and heavy music needs the kick to be processed, so all that bleed comes up with it. A mic inside near the beater has less spill, but as an actual sound source it can sound clicky and thin.

So for heavy music I use mostly the outside mic and gate it, keyed from the inside mic. You need both mics even if you never hear the inside one in the mix.

A kick with no port in the resonant head can sound fantastic, but only if it is a big kick with good heads. It still sounds best with two mics: one further back for the bass, one closer for the transient.

A speaker makes a kick mic#

This used to be a secret trick of the pros: people took the woofers out of studio monitors whose tweeters had blown and clamped them in front of the kick. The commercial "sub kick" came later.

The snare needs a bottom mic, on a stand#

If you mic only the top of the snare, you get the attack but it can lack body or sound hollow. What the bottom mic does depends on the genre. For heavy music, you can go in the direction of Deftones by cranking the lower mids for weight. If you high-pass it, you can get the snare-wire rock sound of later Oasis. But over done, it can sound like hitting a biscuit tin. Some genres such as progressive metal barely use it.

I prefer micing the snare using a mic stand and not a mic clip.

Shock mounts can matter a lot. Drummers keep time with the hi-hat foot, and that tapping travels through the floor and can turn up in the overheads. When tracking drums, using isolating headphones such as the ones from Vic Firth, is a much better idea than standard closed back, and certainly better than open back.

Playing quieter does not make the room drier#

A common tip for a reverberant room is to play the drums more quietly, so you excite the room less. That is complete nonsense. The time it takes a sound to decay is the same whether it was loud or quiet. The drummer hears less reverb at the kit only because everything is quieter, and once you raise the mic gain to compensate, the same proportion of reverb comes back. It is like turning down a record to hear less surface noise. See rooms.

What is most important?#

Many people get the importance of different aspects of drum recording very wrong. How important do you think the sticks are? Fatter sticks make a fatter sound? How much does the performance change the sound of the mix, all else held equal?