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okay. you have one channel available. you can either have -

a mic on the bottom side of the snare to counteract the flat, 'thonky' Tool/Isis-esque snare drum sound and maybe pick up some more attack from your kick drum as to eliminate unnessicary additive eq. this also means you have a mono room mic.

OR

a stereo room sound, which gives further seperation on the guitars that will inevitably bleed through the baffles you just spent 2 days and $120 building, and of course, an enhanced stereo spread for your whole kit. this also means you have to rely on the overheads for the snare rattle.

or another option maybe?

the choice is yours!

-wiggins

my answer would hinge on at the very least the following factors, and probably more.

how would you describe the character of the room sound? is it a really sweet sounding room?

what kinda music is this? loud and rocking, super-distorted guitars? or more toned down or ambient?

what kinda mics are we talking about?

i'm assuming there isn't enough time to just try both and find out which one sounds better... if it's a good room sound, and a not-super-distorted guitar, i'd go for the room mic. but if it's a very distorted guitar or a less-than-great room sound (or if the ambient mics aren't aces in the first place) i'd go for the snare.

as opposed as i am to sweeping generalizations regarding recording techniques ...

... i reckon that, almost without exception, an under-snare microphone would be a very poor complement to a single room microphone.

if just two microphones were available (and if they matched up reasonably well), then my first choice would be some kind of stereo presentation, probably two or three feet in front of the kit; if this failed to impress, i'd then try a mono overhead in combination with a close microphone on the kick drum --- i'd probably try the batter head first, moving to the resonant head if there was too much "rattle" from the snare.

this seems a strange question --- i'm curious: have you had luck with the under-snare-plus-ambient combination in the past?

naoko wrote:this seems a strange question --- i'm curious: have you had luck with the under-snare-plus-ambient combination in the past?

ive never tried it, actually. ive never tried under-snare, period actually.

dear mr. helicopters -

the room, she is not so sweet. 2 car garage. concrete floor, 2 concrete walls. but its the best sounding room we can get aside from hauling our whole studio up 2 flights of stairs and clearing our bass player's parent's hard-wood-floored dining room. the music is pretty loud, but dynamic also. the mikes, they are cheap. octava 012's on the overheads, 1 (one) rode nt-1 for the room mic, a d112 for the kick and bass cab, and 57's on everything else.

dont ask me what we're recording to. please dont.

and what we did today sounded great to my novice ears, consitering the minimal amount of and the dismal quality of the equipment we have.

i guess i just wanted to know whats more important to other people that read this forum. i wont be able to make my decision till i hear both options.

i know that - my favorite records have stereo drum ambience.
- the mono drum sound on that Unwound double cd really annoys me sometimes.
- i can probably get more snare rattle if i backed the mic off a little and maybe lowered it so its pointing more at the center of the shell instead of the head.

...people wonder why im up till 6 every morning. being a nerd. rambling. and rambling. cant stop.

-wags

If I had only two mics, I'd go mono (room + close), and have the close mic right between the toms, right above the kick drum, pointing at the snare, adjust the kick / snare balance through semi-fine positioning, that'd give you a not necessarily unpleasant clear attack to hold the beat together and define the (hopefully) meaty, naturally balanced room sound. You can try eq'ing the mids out on the close mic if you're not happy with the tone, and compress it if the drumming asks for it, it'll still blend decently with the room and sound reasonably natural.

Since you have more tracks than that, I'd save the D112 for the floor tom, since it'll be way out of the range of the close mic. I'd use the 57 as the close mic, btw. I record in a small, not particularly bright room, and I don't ever find myself using the overheads (which I do record), the cymbals on the room mic tend to sound pleasant and balanced enough already. I usually try to find the spot with the most pronounced snare sound on the room for this last mic.

With these three mics plus a good drummer, I think you'd do ok.

I don't care much whether stuff is stereo or not, though.

Is it totally out of the question to try putting the mic behind the drummer?

Here's my crazy idea:

If I only had one track and one mic to record drums (which has never been the case for me if I remember correctly, even on cassette 4-track). I would move the drum kit and drummer to a dead room (like, say, sisters room full of fluffly stuffed animals and dresses and dolls and curtains) and put that one mic behind the drummer so that his body was blocking the sound coming from the annoying hi-hat and so that the cymbals wouldn't be too loud (you wouldn't want him to have a china cymbal or something right over the floor tom otherwise it would be too close to said microphone and too loud, and both crash cymbals and ride cymbal shouldn't be too close to said mic either). That way, you'd hopefully get a loud snare and kick. The tuning on your toms should be pretty bad-ass because you aren't going to have much help from microphone technique to make them sound very awesome, but hopefully you should be getting quite a bit of floor tom in that mic (which seems to be the tom that you have to turn up the most in a typical recording anyway).

And the whole point of that would be so you could make your guitars sound very good (you said there were two guitars) and stereo, and you could essentially go for an AC/DC type of sound where the guitars are huge and the drums are dry and tight.

Depending on the music, I could imagine this sounding quite good.

Anyway, that's just an idea I had for you since going for a great big, live room sound on drums can be difficult if you don't have a great sounding live room and the right mics to take advantage of it.

HTH,
russ

What are you recording for, exactly? A demo?

My band recently recorded in our practice space, and we just did two room mics on the drums and it worked out relatively successfully for our purposes. I would probably suggest that over putting a mic under the snare drum.