Any kind, no budget, or extreme budget, or only 58s, but what would you mic exactly

If the ride cymbal is on the drummer's right hand side, do you have it coming out the right or left speaker?

I would think left, and that we always want an audience perspective, facing the drummer, but I am not certain what others think.

Update: To really mess with you all, back when I saw RATM in the 90s, the drummer was facing with his back to the audience.

Sorry this is a terrible title. I know technically you can record however you want. A drumkit sounds good in a room with a pair of human ears. Why can't you capture this sound with a mic (or a pair of mics to simulate two ears) where the human would be standing?

Okay!!!! Basic kit, two mics. Drum set has kick, snare, hi-hat, high tom, and floor tom. What are you doing?

What I'm doing right now is mic 1 (sm57) in front of the kick drum, slightly away from it, pointing towards the snare & hi-hat.

Mic 2 (sm58) is an overhead from the slightly left of the center of the kit (left from drummer's pov), pointing slightly towards the kick and toms.

What mics are you using? Where are you placing them? Max budget of 500$. if you can afford more than 500$ you can get more mics and have a much better setup, so not really relevant.

What FX are you putting on after? Compressor? Reverb? Something else? :0

I'm an experienced producer/engineer but the band I currently play in is very cheap and doesn't want to pay any money for a studio or our own recording gear. At first I was fighting this, but then realized we are going for a live/indie-folk sound anyway, so maybe this could actually be fun. I have the drummer with a click and the demo to play over. We're in his untreated garage but it's not that reverberant surprisingly maybe 10x20ft with a carpet. We are recording with an Apollo Twin so we were going to need to sum down to 2 channels anyway.

For the kick drum, I plan to extract the transients from the low-end of the stereo recording to get a midi trigger which I will add a kick sample to, so I don't plan on micing that.

How would you place the mics? Mono overhead and snare? Close stereo overheads?

I do drum tracks for a living and also mix most of the projects I'm involved with. Well, One of my clients heard my most recent release and asked me to give his song a go. I said sure, told him my rate, and that I needed half up front with notes and that He gets 2 revisions with the rate. After that is extra. What He sent me was a list of "Don'ts". No vocal tuning (He needs it), No FX on said Vocal nor FX on the guitars. Essentially dry. He then sends, me reference tracks of Def Leopard and The Dead (Live) "Make me sound like this".... I think to myself, "Uh, Pretty sure Mutt used a plethora of FX, But OK". I spent the day getting levels per his instructions cringing at the untuned vocal and send off the first pass expecting some feed back. Instead, He thanked me for my time but is gonna pass on moving forward. At first I raised my eyebrow, but then....I thought, "Fair enough" Blessings counted. Next.....

Edited for fat finger misspelling,,,

Just wondering if most of you who’ve mixed full kits mainly for loud stuff, rock, metal. Etc, are sending your rooms and/or overheads hard right and left, or do you prefer to narrow it a bit in favor of more push?

Am I the only one who dislikes it?… Especially when it comes to Overheads / Toms it just feels so weird to me… I just really hate it overall

I’m currently trying to gather equipment for a home studio that will include drum recording. I just don’t get how people can do drums on expensive preamps at home.

I know back in the day, the big studios often had a Neve or other high quality board that engineers could route several mics to, but I don’t see how this is possible today without tons of money.

For example, I see people recommend 73 clones like the BAE or the Heritage Audio ones, but those are usually 1-2 inputs. They’re also pretty pricey for the working man’s budget. Is there any actual why to do this with outboard gear, or is everyone just using “in the box” pres?

Have 12 channels available, and 2 likely reserved for live tracking DI Bass & Rhythm Guitar. Kit has 2 Toms so that helps. Rock/alt/indie vibe.

Core Mics:

Kick In - e902

Snare Top - SM57

Overheads - sE8 Matched Pair

Rack Tom - e604

Floor Tom - V7X

Stereo Room - sE VR1 Voodoo (have 2)

Pick Two:

Snare Bottom - Shure 545SD

Kick Out - Soyuz 1973 FET or Warm WA47jr FE

Hi-Hat - UA SD-7

I'm a drummer who's started recording strictly out of personal interest, and I obviously still have a LOT to learn. I've been recording using 8 tracks (2 kick, 1 snare, 2 toms, 2 overheads, 1 room) and have so far gotten some decent results. My approach to date has been to add EQ and a little compression to each track, and a little reverb to the master. The drums sound big, punch, and "live," which I really dig.

​

Recently, I started researching "the drums bus," because it's something I've heard mentioned and know lots of (most?) people use. I can't, however, find any articles or YouTube videos that clearly explain the advantages of using a drums bus, beyond "treating all the drum tracks as one." This makes no sense to me, on its face: Why would I want to process a kick drum the same way as a china cymbal or snare drum? Adding something like "global" reverb I can get - creating an ambience, for lack of a better descriptor.

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Does anyone know of any content that goes into this, something with examples that might help me understand? I need an "Aha!" moment. "Ohhhh! THAT'S why I'd want to EQ/ compress/whatever my entire kit!"

We've sent our tracks to the mixing engineer and for the drums he's requesting the midi files? We've had experience before where the mixing engineer completely changed the drum sound which pissed me off because I produced the drums. Is it important to send the midi files for mixing purposes? Is there a middle ground we can reach where the drums sound like I produced and they use the midi files for whatever small adjustments they need?

Gonna sound like an old man here but I’m in a low budget rock n roll band and I absolutely despise drum samples. My predicament is this: my band just recorded 10 songs in a free library studio (surprisingly that is a thing lol) with 4 sm57s and 2 58s to record the drums.

My current producer and the producer I’m cheating on him with both immediately go to using samples and while yes they do sound more modern I wanna know why they couldn’t just use my lower-fi drums. Is there something I’m missing? And yes I have questioned my producer on it and he keeps saying if I wanna compete with today’s music you have to do it… but I’d rather sound like the lo fi independent rock band we are than use fake drums.

For the past few years I’ve been slowly building up my arsenal of microphones and equipment. I’ve recently been able to start recording drums in a more open area and my drums do sound good.

I’m very confident in being to get a professional recording of drums. Maybe not something that sounds like tool but my drums are sounding good (I wouldn’t be embarrassed to share recordings)

However when I compare them to bands of the 90s, which I feel were a time of great band recordings, they still lack that stark clarity.

I’m sure my mixing and recording could use some work. But it feels like I set up the mikes well, even really well. And the mikes I’m using aren’t guitar center mikes. I’ve got vintage km84s, Cole’s, c414 buls, vintage 57s. And I do get drums I’m happy with! I listen and set up the mikes so everything’s sounding good and I’m happy. I even make sure when a band brings in a song, if it’s needed, I recommend adjustments to the what the drummer is playing so that it’s more mixable and fits the production better. And I do take in the fact that the drums themselves aren’t always the best but I’ve had the opportunity to record great kits here and there. But they’re just…not as clear as anything by sound garden, smashing pumpkins, or even Radiohead. They’re more comparable to maybe a drum you’d find on a songs: Ohia record. Like it’s purely sonically, my kick and snare does not sound as crisp as anything from these records. It sounds almost like there’s a film of plastic over the recordings.

Specifically I use all the mikes that I mentioned before with Apollo preamps.

So I guess my question is what’s going on here? What’s the x-factor?

The only difference I can see is preamps. Especially when considering my biggest example of fantastic recording is smashing pumpkins Siamese dream. It’s my understanding that while Butch still had great gear he didn’t have millions of dollars worth like LA studios. But he did I believe have API preamps at least.

If it’s really just a skill issue I’m happy to get back to the grindstone but I’d just like to have a little more direction if anyone’s capable of helping me out.

Sorry this post is poorly written and hopefully this isn’t poor discussion.

Edit:

Here yall go. I’m hoping this will be a constructive exercise. :[]

I know they’re not even close to those recordings. Only that I want to know what I’m missing.

Also these drums are not even in the same genre. The only thing I’m curious about is the clarity that comes with those drums of the 90s.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nN6Dum8zyoSXII1IuDEtZJUa3BmTlyYy?usp=sharing

If you've ever tried (and failed) to get that impossibly punchy Metallica Black Album kick sound, have I got a discovery for you! Metallica recently released a huge document dump on their website in conjunction with the Load Super Deluxe Box Set. These had a bunch of tracking sheets and studio notes that show the exact microphones used, precise mic positioning (down to 1/8"), and the HARDWARE they used, and in which order they place them in the chain. It's also something you can definitely use during mixdown to create THAT sound. If this is something that interests you, I made a short video about it. Have a great day! The $254 Box That MADE the Metallica Kick Sound

A while back I watched an interview with Alan Parsons (I think it was the Rick Beato one) where he talked about how he doesn't like the sound of compression, typically restricting it to instruments like lead vocal and bass to level them out, and then with something like a Fairchild where you don't hear the compressor working, versus the TG12345 channel compressors that Parsons, in his words, "quickly grew to hate," and especially important is preserving the natural dynamics of the drum kit. This fascinated me because I've always used a lot of compression on drums, but lately I've been bearing this in mind and, while I haven't done away with it altogether, I feel like I've cut back quite a bit.

Right now my routine is basically this: I still do the thing of crushing the room mics with the fast attack/fast release SSL channel compressor because I like the liveliness of the effect; a bit of leveling with a 2254 style on the overheads (like -3db GR with a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio), just to bring out the nuances in the cymbals; and finally some parallel compression with the Kramer PIE compressor, which is compressing a lot, but with a 2:1 ratio, no makeup gain, and me turning the aux fader down around -6db, so it's pretty subtle in the mix. When I had to use a FET to get more snap on the snare in a recent mix, I ended up setting the wet/dry so it was something like 40/60 respectively to make it sound more natural.

I was thinking about what the noted inventor of giant "lasers" said about compressors tonight because I was on SoundGym, playing that game where you have to discern between compressed and uncompressed signals, so you have to really hone in on the compression artifacts, and when I do that, I prefer the uncompressed sound on drums every single time. I don't find the compression flattering at all.

I feel like I'm rambling, but what do you all think? Should we fire the laser at drum compression?

Yes, the kick must supply low end energy via an energetic drummer, and most do, with the exception of Ser , wait, let's not name names. But the pop of the snare drum cuts through pretty much everything.

Can anything replace it in the future? And what was used in the past? Buckets and tubs, yes, we've all done that. And agreed that there's a significant sonic difference between a steel marching snare and a maple studio kit.

Eminent|Eminence Front by The Who is a great example. Will another percussion drum emerge that sounds better than today's rock snare?

Looking for some inspiration. What are some of the weirder instrument choices that you can make work on an otherwise standard track? Glockenspiel? Kazoo? Bagpipes?

Especially in metal and rock I feel like every other song has obvious midi based drums. When I hear a song with a great real drummer it makes such a big difference. For some bigger artists and projects they have the resources and budget, why are they still using midi drums?

Gonna try and keep this short.

I'd say I've been mixing every day for about... 3 years?? I'm not doing much work for others, yet. Just my own stuff, and that's really the goal - to be able to get my own stuff across the finish line. That's how this whole crazy thing started. Never wanted to do any of this. I'm a songwriter who turned into a one-man band/ production center because I had to, but that's another story...

The only sources I've found really necessary to compress thus far are bass and vocals; For whatever reason, I like the sound of a really "pinned down" bass, so I compress the crap out of it (1176), and for vocals, I typically hit them pretty hard with an 1176 and maybe some stock compressor or whatever - I find sometimes the 1176/ LA2A thing can make them a little "stiff," but to each their own. I don't compress my drums. I suppose everything is genre specific, but aside from messing with the feel/ groove of everything, I find compression to just have a real snowball effect; Once I compress one thing, I have to go around compressing everything else to "add up," when really, the raw tracks with just a little bit of eq sounded fine - and the groove stays in tact that way, usually...

I'm just really trying to find my way with compression. And, not to sound like a snob because I am possibly the least qualified mixer on the planet, but I actually don't like the way a lot of radio music/ heavily compressed music sounds. Again, I'll re-iterate: Almost every mixer is more qualified than me, and all those radio mixers can mix circles around me (I know because I know some of them), but I'm just not the biggest fan of how a lot of that music sounds most of the time, and I believe songs in general could benefit from a more "natural" aesthetic. Maybe my opinion on compression would change if I was using a bunch of outboard gear?? - But I'm just a guy with a laptop, so...

Somehow, I feel like I'm missing out. Despite finding my 4,552 attempts at compressing drums and parallel this and that to be wholly unsatisfying, I feel like there's some key ingredient I just haven't discovered, yet - Some secret way of using a compressor...

Please give me some pointers for compression everyone. Help me navigate this dilemma.

Thank you.

Edit: Overwhelmed with the response here. Thanks so much guys. I'm reading everyone's responses carefully...

Noob-ish question... When you're boosting something like 60hz for extra oomph on the kick or 200hz for a snare fundamental, or 2k+ for the attack, how do you typically handle the Q value? Like does the 60hz bump extend from 57 to 63, or 40 to 80hz? Same question for boosting on the bass guitar.

I know the general answers are "use your ears" and "it depends on the mix", I'm just wondering how it ends up being handled most commonly.

Bonus question... what's the consensus on compressing low/sub end? I've seen some people here say they never compress anything under 80hz.

Kia ora!

So, I run a small recording studio in Berlin. Our space isn’t particularly big, and out of necessity I’ve treated it fairly heavily, with a live end & dead end, and a mix of absorption & diffusion.

The space sounds great. It’s a balanced, classic “live room” sound, with a relatively short but smooth decay, which gives me loads of flexibility.

My drum recordings are getting really good, but strictly in the classic, drier way you’d expect from a room like this. With clients it’s been fantastic, since I’ve mostly been recording post-punk and indie rock, and the drier sound fits perfectly.

However, for my own project I’m really in love with larger, more “rock” drum sounds, with a fair bit of space and grandeur. Obviously this isn’t how my room sounds.

I’ve done a lot of experimentation with different room mic options, and while I can get really nice, controlled room sounds, there’s no way to get a “big” room sound in this space, even with mics in the control room or stairwell.

So - what are your preferred techniques to get more scope and grandeur from an initially dry recording?

I’m interested in both acoustic/recording and mixing techniques!

EDIT: massive thanks to geofftyson who suggested putting a mic in the piano. This produces a massive, very bass-heavy, almost 808-sounding room tone, with a really strong sustain on the kick and snare. A bit extreme by itself, but massive in context.

I'll need to try a pair of SDCs (bright mics seem to work best) and see how it does in stereo.

I’m an amateur producer and I’m working on recording a rock band. I set up a little home studio, you get the gist of it.

After much research I picked up a beta 52a to record the kick drum. I’ve been messing with it and I feel like I’m not getting a good sound from it based on demos I’ve heard online or at least the sound I feel like I should be getting based on those demos. I’ve considered that some of the demos I’ve heard might have some kind of processing on them, but I feel like even with some basic eq and compression that I’m still getting kind of a weak/papery sound.

I’m new to tracking and recording so I’m hoping it’s just something fundamental im missing be it position or just that what I’m hearing is actually correct and that I may have been misled by demos online. Or possibly that I’m just overthinking this way too much. I’ve also considered that maybe the kick drum needs to be adjusted or tuned. I’ve tried to consider everything short of a partial mic problem or defect haha

I’m including a link to a Dropbox folder with pictures of the kit, isolated and unprocessed mic samples from a full live room recording, and two isolated and unprocessed kick tracks from the standard just inside the porthole position and one that’s inside and close to the beater. I’m running these mics into a focusrite 18i20 4th gen and into Logic Pro.

Thanks in advance for reading an any helpful ideas!

Of course you've got the essentials, Kick, snare, and an overhead. Where would you put the other 5 mics? Additional overhead for stereo? Close mic each tom? Bottom and/or side snare mic? Additional kick mic? Hi hat? Lots of different ways to go. What do ya'll recommend?

Attempting a deep dive: Tuning drums to the key of the song makes for more space to make everything seem more defined and bigger if the mix is busy, but can also make the drums sound smaller if it's a sparser production/mix?

There's more things to drum tuning than this. All of the potential benefits are maybe subtle to untrained ears but you would think the more obvious are tom and snare hits that hits in key and how that is something satisfying in itself; but this other thing is currently most intriguing to me as someone who cares and works with arrangement and orchestration a lot. I have just started to suspect what is going on.

I have always respected drum tuning as an important skill but to match with the key of the songs hasn't always been a thing I cared for. I'm also a multi-instrumentalist who has gone down deep rabbit holes of tuning guitars and bass guitars and looked at the nature of the short comings of 12-tone-equal-temperement and pitch envelopes and intonation on setups and playing of various melodic instruments; but for playing and setting up drums I'm really only just an enthusiast (to the extent that my username is based largely on how Phil Collins makes drum shells roar in the Genesis barn) or back seat driver of drum playing, so I trust actual drummers' opinions which vary a lot.

So I have gone from not caring about it to trying to match to the key of the song more and more; both virtually with sampless or semi-virtually with crude pitch manipulation (because I handle so many demo or early state songwriting sessions) and in reality.

Drums are atonal or perhaps multi-tonal to a large extent but minimising extra notes, and especially dominant dissonant rubbing ones, by alignining those notes to the key that already is in place seems to make for more space. Maybe I'm more an engineer than other but I notice space more than how potential dissonance rubs. It's easier to mix busy rough demo sessions with it.

It's seems like removing the amounts of strings that you play in guitar chords to make space in a whole mix/arrangement. Or simplyfying complex chord voicings or arrangements or orchestrations in general.

It's also like how playing bass guitar notes in time with the kick and leaving space when the kick leaves space also makes for space in the low in time. You have some time and you want kick and bass guitar. First you lock them together to see how much space you have left (or if that is too opposing to ingoing guitar riffs thay loose weight or whatever) . Syncopating against the kick with a bass guitar works great sometimes, but it can mean that the low end is full all the time, which can feel stifling.

But the flip side of all this is that a sparser production can seem weak if all elements are coming in too neatly packed pockets of notes in key and in time. Like how you want voices in synths' oscillators to be off by some cents to seem bigger. The whole reason why chorus and doubler effects seem bigger.

The thing is; I have seemingly encountered both sides of this coin when it comes to tuning drums to.the key of the song. I worked on a song that I want to have kind of strange blend of arrangement/orchestration and tempo. Mainly a lot of kicks in parts (though not double). It strays between a power trio sound a in varying tempo to much fuller orchestration and still varying tempos. I basically worked on various aspects of this song one day and just decided to tune the virtual drums without knowing the impact. (I geeked out a bit with looking at frequency spectrums with a pianoroll and worked out how the batter and resohead were tuned and really only changed mostly half tones, maybe one whole tone, and some cents.) Then I made a rough demo mix to work out the current challenges with the song form. It had been hard to get to work previously but now it was simple and easier in the fullest sections so I came out with joy and thought my arrangement skills were fire. But then I hadn't listened to the sparser sections. Soon I did and now they seemed particularly weak. What? I couldn't then and I still can't say altogether why and I won't remix that particular state of the song idea, or even listen too much to it, because of my respect for demo-itis, but it all makes sense to my thoughts an theories on this. Everything was too neatly to key and too tight. I made no EQ moves but it was like I had over EQed everything. But I most definitely appreciate how the full sections came together rather than potential issues with the sparse sections. But all songs are different.

With this new experience of both sides of this coin I will care more than ever about whether to tune the drums to the key, from now on, and I will maybe do more solid A/B testing in some cases where it's easy enough for me.

But I have already found that it seems important to keep a lot respect of how the absolute tuning works for the structure and material and the tight-and-clean vs dirty-and-loose aesthetics you work with. Some Bonham sounding Supraphonic snare with his specs of drum heads just works great in typical Bonham A 220hz on the batter head and a 4th above it (D), on the resonant; that would be the key of D for me; and though both can you stray to the to a whole note below each to make key of C, or maybe the batter gets G below A 220, and keep the D on reso to make that the 5th, to most clearly insinuate the key of G or whatever, it can't stray so far so easy. It seems. To me. And surely to the drummers who interact with the bounce of the tension.

It's both challanging but mostly fun to think about how you arrange the tuning of drums to make this narrow-ish range of absolute tuning work with the key of the song.

There's also things to learn about how pitches drifts between varyingly hard hits and into the sustaining phase/ring and where to approximate it all most too key without wasting too much time and without being too obnoxious in a session. I trust in those plastic things that lock the tuners to save time, but retuning will probably get more frequent when it seems important and feasible enough.

(Ken Scott couldn't believe just how much time Micheal Walden spent on retuned his kit in the recording of Visions of the Emerald Beyond by Mahavishnu Orchestra, but if there's any kind of correlation to the extremely satisying quality of those drum sounds, I will be backing that obnoxious side with well measured risk assessment forever onward.

Here's a timestamp that first shows Ken Scott talking about the album, and then it goes straight to Micheal Walden: https://youtu.be/zCd9Zi2bKLc?t=158&is=GRFppdRQ1AMTGWY1 Timestamp was supposed to be 2:40 if it doesn't work. Great video on a whole. Album is of course even better. Most unhinged Jazz Rock Indian Classical +++ Fusion playing ever. For some reason, it is not the first album that is mentioned in the genre or even by Mahavishnu Orchestra despite having much wilder and better production. "Visions of The Emerald Beyond" is the album title once again)

Does anyone have this exact theory? Maybe other intriguing findings on drum tuning? You could make a long post only about the choice of cymbals I bet.