Premier Rock Forum

Hi, this is my first post, I should apologize first for my *poor* english.

I have to record a junior drum kit for a jazz band, and the room is very small, I think about 3x3 meters or so. Considering the small size, therefore practically non-existant reverberation, do you think it's better to record it close-miked or with an overhead stereo pair? The size of the DK has something to do with the recording technique?
we have just four studio hours and we'd like to go right to the better option. So, if anyone had recorded a drum set in a small room an could give any advice, it would be great!

i once recorded drums (not a small kit, but a kit that sounded small) in a very small room and was happy with the final result. i only had 2 microphone channels to work with, and i ended up using one SM57 and one AT Pro37R. i put the drums toward one side of the room, NOT near the middle. i put the SM57 about 1 meter away from the kick drum, about 10 to 15cm off the floor. the Pro37R was maybe at cymbal height, a little over a meter above the floor, also about 1 meter or more away from the kit. i recorded the two channels, and was able to mix them together for a nice sounding mono mix. it sounded like a much bigger room than it was. i would have tried a stereo pair of Pro37R's if i had another mic and another channel to work with.

good luck!

While every situation is different, close mics on a drum kit have the tendency to separate individual drums. This is not always a good thing, and you may try (for simplicity's sake) a stereo mic in front of the drum kit (try navel high, so as not to exaggerate the cymbals), with a close mic on the bass drum for balance adjustment.

If the simple setup leaves you wishing you had finer control, then try the same setup with a couple more close mics.

For jazzy drumming, the individual drums are less important than the overall impression the drums make, so you may find the simpler setup suits the music better. For rock music and other music where patterns and fixed beats are important, it's usually better to have control of individual drums.

Usually.

John Bonham was meticulous about the sound of his drums, and he was quoted as saying he wouldn't let any mic be closer than 10 feet to the drums.

Experiment, but do it with a purpose.

steve wrote:Experiment, but do it with a purpose.

after reading this statement (which is so very true) and re-reading my post, i left out a critical piece of information: the reason why i tried the SM57 where i did...

moving the mics further away from the kit will of course give you more of the room sound, and moving them closer will of course give you more of the direct sound.

micing drums with *no* room sound, only close-mic sound, usually sounds unnatural to me. but using only a stereo pair of mics, the bass frequencies are not as present as i'd like.

a good balance between the two that i found was to use a "low frequency" mic (the best i had at the time was an SM57, though now i'd likely try the sennheiser 421 or beyer M88 for this application, possibly even the beta52, just to see how it performed) a good distance away from the kit, but *near the floor*.

with close-micing, many mics have a "proximity effect" where the low frequencies get boosted as the mic is moved very close to the sound source. there is a similar effect that occurs along a boundary, such as a floor, where the low frequencies are louder near the floor than they are as you move farther away from it.

so the reason i tried putting the "low frequency" mic near the floor, but at a distance, was so i could get both a little bit of the room sound (to make it sound bigger and more natural) and also the free low-end boost from being near the floor (to make it sound less tinny and more full).

if the floor is very reflective (i.e. not carpet) you may want to experiment with putting something like a towel or area rug between the kit and the near-floor mic. this will give you added control of what frequencies this mic pics up. in my case, the floor had a thin industrial carpet on it, so less of the high frequencies came through. which was fine.

the drum part recorded this way used a lot of toms and rolls on the snare (the snares were turned off, also) and very slow but hard beats on the kick. putting the mic near the floor but away from the kit provided a bit of low end i could add in, and it added to the low end of the toms, snare, and kick, not *just the kick drum* like you would get with a mic right near its shell.

i still remember the day malcolm took us out in the hallway and had us do this, 2 people at a time, stand maybe 10 feet apart, in this hallway, and take turns talking to each other, and listening. and then one guy would move his head near the wall and listen as the other guy kept talking. this is a great way to hear exactly what the effect in question sounds like, for free. going to that college was worth every penny.

I've found that using a pair of AKG 414's set to omni placed a few feet apart at a height of about 3-4 feet and about 10-12 feet away from the kit gives very nice results. It's nice to have some control over the individual drums as well, so I tend to mic the kick and the snare.

Occasionally I'll mic the toms as well, but I've never found this to be totally necessary.

Hey, thanks for your replies. I think I will experiment with the "stereo overheads plus one or two close's" thing. I've seen in a book a mic placement that goes setting a bidirectional mic in the middle of the snare and hihat, maybe that makes sense for a jazzy playing... we'll see!
You know, this is my first band recording in my school (learning to mess with consoles and mics here, trying to become sort of an engineer) and they leave us all alone with the bands.
I'll let you know how it goes!