I am surprised that people kept posting their thoughts about this subject but i guess it is an interesting one that challenges best engineers, that is, doing more with less. i have moved on from the techniques i used in the sense that i cannot expect to get the same sound from my mics from the same position as if i'd use better ones. more work on the sound of the proper drums has been done. i told my drummer to stop banging that god damned ride-crash and change the patches and it has worked miracles. thank you all. i still have got a lot of work ahead.

Hello, Oscar --

I personally *love* the two mic drumset. If you've got a dramatic sounding space, especially. Here's what I would do (and have done, on a few different records) in your situation:

Put the 58 on a boom stand. Set the stand directly in front of the kick drum and position the microphone a few inches equidistant from the snare and kick drums, pointed down toward the snare bottom.

Place the condenser microphone as far from the drumset as you can get it, even aimed away from the drums; maybe into a window or mirror or something.

Experiment with some compression on the close microphone; sometimes you can pull the set together a little bit with a slow attack / medium ratio / quick release sort of thing. It'll depend on the player (as it always does, regardless of budget, equipment or situation). The coolest thing about this setup is that you get a nice picture of the whole drumset; by nature, the close microphone ends up being about as far from the toms as it does from the kick and snare. You'll get some attack from all the drums in the kit, and a fair amount of thud from the kick drum (you may have to crank it up a little). The body and sense of space comes from the room microphone. If the room is big enough, you'll avoid some basic phase problems this way, and you've got a simple, mono mix where it's easy to control impact and dimentionality: one fader for each.

Stylized, to be sure, but very cool with a little bit of tweaking.

— Chris