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Drums - The Backbone to your Recordings!

12 TIPS FOR BETTER DRUM RECORDING

1. Keep it simple. Learn to get a great sound using a minimum of gear, and then build on your successes from there.
2. See the big picture. The final recorded sound is determined not only by the gear and how you use it, but also by the drummer, the drums, and the recording space. Do what you can to bring out the best in each.
3. Learn the basics of drum tuning, and acquaint yourself with the drum kit's many parts and how they work. To be fully prepared, keep a drum toolkit on hand .
4. Seek out great-sounding rooms to record in — if you don't have a decent drum room, that can make a huge difference in the final sound. Think large rooms, high ceilings, wood floors (churches, art galleries, warehouses).
5. Find the drums' sweet spot in the room. A drum kit will project different tonal balances depending on where it's positioned in a given space. If you're after a great sound, it's worth the effort to suss out the best-sounding location for the drums.
6. Make the drummer comfortable. Much depends on his or her performance.
7. Select microphones by type. Typically, dynamics are used for close-miking kick, snare, and toms (with the largest diaphragm reserved for the kick), and condensers are used for overheads, hi-hats, and assorted percussion. But don't be afraid to buck convention — use what sounds good and works best for the song.
8. Use proper stereo recording techniques. They can not only add a delicious spatial realism to your drum recordings, but a stereo pair can also cover the whole kit sound when you don't have enough close mics to go around.
9. Minimize phase distortion between mics. Use the 3-to-1 rule, but also do test recordings and listen in mono to ensure phase coherence, especially between drum overheads and other mics.
10. Maximize signal-to-noise ratio for each track. With digital, the loudest hits should use up most of the bits; with analog tape, hit it till it hurts, then back off a touch.
11. Angle the mics rather than positioning them so their diaphragms are parallel with drum heads. That can lead to problematic phase interactions caused by reflections between the parallel surfaces.
12. Use your ear, not your eye, to do final mic-position tweaks.

Jim Koblick

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