Adding mics to drum kits can bring extra control or a larger than life sound for the mix, but many mics pointed at the same thing can throw up other challenges. Here we talk about those and one way to fix them quickly, easily, and cheaply.
In Summary
Adding mics to drums for extra control or a larger than life sound for the mix is familiar to many. Here we use Nugen Aligner to fix some of the challenges that many mics pointed at the same thing can throw up. We use it on a group of drum mics for time and polarity treatments at the press of a button.
Going Deeper
Are More Mics Better?
For some, the purist approach of recording drums with as few mics as possible can turn in fantastic results, however the organic sound of the kit in the room isn’t always the aim. When the snap and immediacy of a more produced sound is preferred, the engineer can start to add mics as needed.
In a multi mic recording, it’s a fact of life that many of these mics will often hear their target as well as a few other things that are further away. In the case of overhead mics on a kit, these will hear drums later than any close mics will. These tiny delays can amount to offsets that can affect the sound.
In the pre digital era, tweaking mic positions and checking with polarity were the time-honoured ways of ensuring the best combined sound. This still applies now under the mantra that never gets old: Record Well, Mix Fast.
In the box, engineers have a number of options to hone the sound. While rotating the phase of mics is one way to help, a simpler way is to manually realign waveforms in time so that mics hear everything at the same time, or at times that give the best sound.
Nugen Aligner
Nugen’s recently updated Aligner plugin does this automatically using delay offsets and polarity. By placing instances across drum tracks (or any group of mics with a common target), they can be realigned so that their waveforms are less affected by the effects of time.
In the video we show how Aligner can be used on a subgroup of drum mics. Listening to an unprocessed recording, we then simply assign a common Group to all the mics before hitting the Align button. We set the kick as Reference so that Aligner knows which tracks to anchor and which to conform. Other common references could include overheads or snare.
Engineers can experiment with inverting the polarity and the amount of alignment for manual control. Its A and B Groups mean that Aligner could be used on more than one subgroup of tracks, taking in drum mics, versus cab mics, for example.
Stick, Slip, Or Rotate?
Sometimes delays between mics will just happen to sound fine regardless. This is especially true in more ambient recordings with less correlation between channels. In these settings, engineers can count their blessings and get on with everything else. More recently we have had access to tools that actually rotate the phase to help things along. While clever, anyone who has tried these will have asked themselves “Same, better, or just different?” when deciding on offsets (and not before a ear good break, either!).
Where optimising delays could help instead, some will argue that doing it ‘in-mic’ will always turn in the best results. That might be true, but even those with lots of time to tweak positioning or polarity might admit that this often takes a lot of time to get right. However fixes are achieved, using a tool like Aligner ditches the guesswork to get results.
Nugen Audio Aligner is available to buy for $29 until 27th June 2023 (normally $49).
A Word About This Article
As the Experts team considered how we could better help the community we thought that some of you are time poor and don’t have the time to read a long article or a watch a long video. In 2023 we are going to be trying out articles that have the fast takeaway right at the start and then an opportunity to go deeper if you wish. Let us know if you like this idea in the comments.
Drum background image by cottonbro studio