One of the most technically complex but creatively rewarding activities in music production, recording live drums can be a challenge for any engineer. Here are some things to bear in mind when capturing your next tub thumper. We’re chiefly concerned with the drum kit here, but we’ll be touching on hand percussion in a couple of areas as well.
Only Use The Kit Pieces You Need
No matter how much your drummer might moan about it, don’t let them bring any more than the drums and cymbals they’re actually going to use to the recording session. For the vast majority of projects, kick and snare drums, two or three toms, hi-hats, two crashes and perhaps a ride cymbal are enough, and it’s not at all unusual for a drum track to call for nothing more than kick, snare and hats. Not only does keeping the kit pared back to the minimum required cut down on setup time and complexity, and possibly the number of mics involved, but it also goes a long way towards alleviating intrusive noise and resonances, which we’ll come back to.
So, if your drummer pulls out a second kick drum, a battery of toms or a cloud of cymbals – or your percussionist puts all the struck, shaken and scraped instruments at their disposal on the table – ask them to justify the presence of every item, point out the benefits of getting rid of all those that aren’t likely to get any action, then tell – not ask – them to do so. Of course, the drummer won’t always know what they need until they start figuring out the drum track, but even then, they should still be able to realistically make a call on whether or not those three massive China-type cymbals are likely to be necessary.
Listen Out For And Deal With Unwanted Noises
Being the sum of a great many parts, some of them highly mechanical in nature, the drum kit is capable of making all sorts of extraneous sounds that need to be minimised in the interest of getting a good, clean recording. Squeaky kick drum and hi-hat pedals are common and easily resolved issues (a blast of WD40), as are rattly lugs on drums with their bottom heads removed (gaffer tape); but stopping snare wires from rattling when the toms are struck is rather trickier to physically fix and might demand gating or volume-automating out.
With regard to hand percussion, some congas suffer from high-frequency resonance that’s easily resolved by tying a string or thread between two opposing lug nuts inside the drum, then hanging a tea towel or similar over it. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of making sure any unused shakers and tambourines are taken out of the room, as discussed above, to prevent sympathetic rattling sounds.
Focus On The Overhead Mics
While the close mics pointed at the snare, kick drum, hi-hats and toms capture the specific attack and tonality of those individual kit elements, and are essential for realising a detailed, impactful drum mix, it’s in the overheads that the magic happens, pulling the whole kit together into a cohesive, spatially coherent whole. Indeed, many great drum recordings have been made using nothing but overheads! For that reason, as counter-intuitive as it might seem, we’d suggest starting the recording setup process by getting a solid ‘overview’ of the kit in that all-important pair, before moving the close mics into position to bring out the best in each drum.
There are various configurations of overheads to consider, depending on the sort of sound you’re aiming for. The default spaced pair, with the two overheads positioned on either side of the kit, is great for a wide stereo image but can cause phase issues due to their separation, so an X/Y setup – two mics next to each other, with their capsules angled inwards to form an apex – might be preferable, eliminating phasing at the expense of a certain amount of width. An often effective technique worth trying before you take the X/Y route, though, is placing your spaced pair equidistant from the snare, as that will usually be the main culprit when it comes to phase problems.
Check For And Correct Phase Issues
And on that subject, phase is a consideration in any multi-mic recording, with the discrepancies in timing between microphones capturing the same source signal potentially resulting in a thinning or hollowing of the sound as the peaks and troughs in their waveforms become ‘unsynced’. With the drum kit, this applies mostly to overheads (see above), top and bottom snare mics, and front and inside kick mics, and you can address it at the recording stage by hitting the phase invert button on any one of the input channels in question – if the channels are out of phase, the improvement will be very obvious.
Alternatively, post recording, you can use the phase invert switches on your DAW’s mixer channels to the same effect, zoom in and slide the waveforms into phase in the arrange page (so that their peaks and troughs match), or fire up Sound Radix’s brilliant Auto Align 2, which instantly phase locks any number of channels at the click of a button.
Take Steps To Manage Spill… Or Not
Like phasing, mic spill is just a fact of life in live drum and percussion recordings, with the snare drum inevitably leaking into the hi-hat and tom mics, the kick getting picked up by the bottom snare mic, cymbals encroaching on the tom mics, and congas seeping into each other’s close mics. You can go some way towards dealing with this particular annoyance using filters and gates, but is it actually worth the effort, particularly given that such manipulations can also alter the non-spill part of the signal too? Ultimately, the drum kit is meant to come across as a single cohesive instrument, its distinct components unifying organically in the mix, to which end a degree of spill is arguably desirable – so don’t stress about it too much, we say. If you find yourself chasing down a bit of spill that’s only really noticeable when the receiving channel is soloed, and perhaps even adds to the overall energy and sizzle of the kit, it might be best left alone or suppressed only enough to make it less apparent.
Share your top drum recording tips and tricks in the comments.
Photos by Kenny Eliason and ASBA Drums on Unsplash.