Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to see a method to record a drumkit slightly different from the version proposed in our main "How to mic a drumkit" article, and somehow this can be considered also a more advanced version of it: we're going to see how to microphone a drumkit with 8 mikes, but with 2 toms instead of 3 (including the floor tom) and using 2 microphones for the snare: one for the top and one for the bottom. In this article I will elaborate also a bit more regarding the mic positioning.
Let's start with the kick: this time I did not push the mic too deep, trying to get close to the beater: I've realized that the low end generated by the proximity effect is higher than the "click" of the beater I wanted to catch, so I backed the microphone leaving it half inside the hole and half out (yes, it sounds like a horrible pun, but there's nothing I can do about it :D): this way the lows are under control and the microphone picks up better also the top end, the result is a more balanced and usable tone.
Moving to the toms, this is something I've tried to apply the same principle to the toms and to the snare: to try to aim the mike towards a point close to the border of the shell, because pointing towards the center makes the tone too dark, but if you aim too much to the border you get too much ring, so you need to try until you find the right balance between the ring and a nice, full but bright tom sound (this applies also to the floor tom). Also, don't forget that since usually dynamic microphones are cardioids, it's good to point the back of the microphone towards the loudest cymbals, because the back of the microphone is the part that picks up less sound, so it will limit the bleed.
Finally, talking about the snare, as you can see from the pic, I've decided to use a Shure Beta58a for the top and a Shure SM57 for the bottom, trying to create a 90 degrees angle.
Both microphones were pointing towards a similar spot, like the one for the toms: close to the border, but not to the point that it picks up too much ring note, if the ring was too strong, I was moving the snare top mike 1cm more towards the center, until eventually I've found the sweet spot.
In this case the snare top mike takes the body of the snare sound and some ring, while the snare bottom one is aimed to pick up the top end, the grainier, more explosive part of the tone.
This way we have a lot of flexibility when creating our snare tone during the mixing phase.
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Your comprehensive guide on how to mic a drum kit with a focus on the snare top and bottom microphones is a fantastic resource for anyone involved in drum recording. Could you elaborate on the creative possibilities and tonal differences that can be achieved by experimenting with different placements and microphone types? Tel U
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