Drum Pan

Recording a drum kit

Audio production is a fun and yet highly skilled procedure. The processes involved are recording, mixing and online mastering. So you are going to record a drum kit and that is a big instrument to record. In fact it is a set of instruments that sounds as a whole. the first thing to note about drum recording is that the drummer should tune to drum kit to perfection, if possible the drum heads will have been replaced 2/3 weeks before the recording so they are new but bedded in. Well tuned drums make good recordings, it's a fact so ensure they are tuned to perfection. For recording you may wish to dampen down the toms decay times a little using a product called moon gel, it's sticky gel that reduces the decay time on the toms.

So the standard drum kit is made up of 3 toms. a snare drum a kick drum and cymbals and hi hat. The choice of mics can be very personal. As a general rule you will want mics with a good low frequency response for the floor tom and kick drum. So lets speak about the close mics, commonly a good quality dynamic microphone will be used on the toms a good choice would be MD421 or SM57 mics, both dynamic microphone, they are robust have good presence and can handle high sound pressure levels with ease. The snare drum mic choice again is personal many favour an SM57 or an Beta 57 microphone, a new comer is the i5 microphone, again all of these are dynamic mics. Kick drums often require a special microphone that has a built in eq curve which boosts the low frequency content and also has a presence peak to give the attack a clear boost. The hi hat often has it's own close mic which is often a small disphragm condenser mic. So thats close mics done, now you can consider the drum overhead mics.

These are commonly a stereo pair of microphones set up in the engineers favoured stereo mic technique, this could be XY,  stereo spaced pair, Blumlein etc. etc. Typically these mics will be condenser mics as they have a great high frequency response and pick up the high frequency sound of cymbals and hit hats well. positioning mics around the drum kit can be a little trick for a first timer. You will require some floor standing mic stands and a small special mic stand for the kick drum. As a general rule you can aim the mic towards the centre of the drum from around 2-3 inches from the edge of the drum head, this should produced a punchy and well rounded sound. of course you can experiment with the exact positioning until you get the drum tone that is required.

It is very important to check the phase of drum microphones to ensure that when they are mixed together that they are reinforcing instead of canceling low frequency sounds. This can be done by using phase inversion switches on the mixer or panning mics hard left and right and them summing them in central position and listening to the effect on the low frequencies. Ask yourself if the low end is reinforced or not when chosen pairs of mics are mono'd. When recording always leave sufficient headroom when recording drums as the peaks can often easily jump up 6dB higher than you might think once the drummer is performing. All of this plays nicely into later stages of production such as mixing and online mastering in a mastering studio.

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Drum Pan

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