I’ve started recruiting local musicians to come to my home and cut loops to release under the CC.

To that end, I need advice on recording drums. I’ve recorded live performances a few times but, nothing too technical and, I basically don’t want to look like an idiot if these guys are going to be nice enough to come to my home and set up their kits.

What I have for equipment is..

A Behringer eurorack 1002 mixer..
3 Nady sp2 mics, and a Shure SM58
(I’ll be recording stereo directly to Acid or soundforge)


I can possibly borrow a few other things. Stands, etc.

What’s the best way to go about this?

(Victor, I’m looking at you)

-G

Quote: need advice on recording drums

Here’s the best site I know of for information overload on all recording topics (the link goes to the drum recording forum, but check out the whole site - there are like a million+ posts, including many from pros and elite home recording gurus):

http://www.homerecording.co...

[edit] - your best bet will be to register and then use the search function

….. .. .

From Joe Chellman ( http://www.chellman.org/music/
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Quote:
I’m not familiar with the gear he’s using, especially wrt the Nady mics. But if I’m going to recommend a simple setup, I’d say one mic on the kick, one on the snare, and two overhead in an XY or whatever he wants. Get most of the sound from the overheads and bring in the kick and snare to beef up the sound as needed. I specifically avoid micing the hihat in a situation like this, since it cuts through in the overheads pretty easy, and drummers have a tendency to play it a little louder than it needs to be anyway.

Another interesting technique I’ve used at home is the “recorderman” technique. Here’s an explanation of it I saved. I’ve used this technique at home, although not too terribly much, since I haven’t been doing much recording at home in the past several months, alas. But it’s a good one for recording with minimal mics.

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1. Place the “Left” overhead mic directly over the center of the snare at the height of two drum sticks-held end-to-end(from the center of the snare, straight up, to the capsule of the mic).
2. Next; take the drum sticks (still held end-to-end) from the center of the snare over to above your ( i.e.” the drummers”) right shoulder and place your “right” overhead mic here.
3. Fine tune the placement by using a mic cable and measurinb the distance from the center of the Kick to each of these mics is also equidistant from the kick and snare.
4. listen with headphones and have the drummer lightly hit his kick drum, and adjust the “right” mics angle until the kick is in the middle of your “image”.

What this has done is:
1. Place the snare & the kick in the center when you pan these mics hard left and right.
2. Place the overheads in a position which is in-phase with the kick,snare and overheads.
3. balanced the over heads so that the Rack and floor Toms (as well as all cymbals) are correctly balanced.

this is actually a great “picture” of the kit at this point. maybe a hair of Top end (depending on what mics your using) and a little this, and a Kick mic. BUT whatever you add (snare mics, toms, etc) you’ll now be inphase. This also makes your snare & toms louder inrelation to the cymbals & is more of a true OH mic set-up (Not just “cymbal” mic’s) It may look weird but try it…it truelly ROCKS

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It’s a good two-mic technique that you can flesh out, again, with another one on the kick drum. Mixing down directly to stereo, I’d say this is one to at least try.

I can also say the same dorky thing everyone else says: use your ears! :)

Joe

From Keith of http://citizenkeith.com

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Quote: Cool! I’ve been using the method described here:

http://homerecording.com/bb...

it works really, really well. i’ll also try variations, like adding an inside-kick mic and blending that with the outside mic.

hope that helps!

keith

Ideally you want to mic each drum separately and mix individual levels on your behringer before recording. Tweak highs, lows, mids, and gain to your liking for each individual drum…before you start to record.

The other thing the recording will be dependent on is the pickup pattern of your mics. for example, mics with cartiod pickup patterns have a range limited to a local bubble shaped space in front of the mic. Hypercartiod mics have the bubble shaped space in front and a smaller bubble shaped pickup area directly behind the mic…but nothing to the sides. Omni-directional mics have a larger peripheral pickup area. Shotgun mics have an narrow pickup field that extends for a larger distance directionally in front of the mic.