I’m getting ready to record a new record – which usually means, time to suffer through getting drum sounds. In the past, I put too many mics on the kit, rushed placing the mics on the kit (and didn’t listen to what the mics were getting), and ended up turd-polishing in the mix – struggling to make the drums sound good.

It’s 2008, and I’ve decided to get lazy and smart. I’m spending WAY more time on prepping the drum room, and I’m using a the minimal ‘recorderman‘ drum micing technique. To prep the drum room, I used lots of bass trapping (corner traps made of stacked dense pillows with an air gap behind the column) and RealTraps hung on the ceiling. I got the RealTraps without the usual reflective coating, so they absorb HF cymbal energy. The room sounds quite good – and it’s only 7′ x 7′ x 8′ high!

OK OK OK – but here is the best part – I got a pair of Avenson STO-2 omnidirectional mics. These things are freaking fantastic. I mounted them on some really cool mic arms which are springy and adjustable so you can move the mics easily to any position or angle.

Running these mics into an Apogee Ensemble pre, with NO EQ in Logic, plus a tiny bit of reverb = BLOCK ROCKING KICKING DRUM SOUNDS. SO EASY, I feel like I’m cheating. The Avensons are really wonderful mics – but I don’t think I’d be getting these great results if the room wasn’t treated properly.

Next, the kick mic – I was considering not using one at all because the overheads sounded so good. But, I wanted a bit more depth in the overall kit sound, so a kick-micing we go. I have a classic AKG D112 kick mic, but I think it’s better for open-front kick sounds, and I wanted to leave the front head on. Next I tried my SM81 – it sounded like crap everywhere facing the front kick head. I saw an ad in Tape Op for a Josephson mic, and it looked like it was being used to mic the SHELL of a kick drum. I tried pointing the mic at the kick rim, 45-degrees inwards about .25″ away from the top of the kick. It sounded good, but got more tom sound reflected off the top of the kick than I wanted. I feared this would kill the awesome stereo image I was getting from the Avendsons, so I flipped the mic so it was pointing 45 degrees away from the kick rim. Bingo!

I ran the SM81 bass-drum mic to another channel of the Ensemble, and sucked-out about 4 dB of 300 Hz and did a 3 dB boost at 80 Hz. BOOM. Just enough bottom-end-support to anchor the sound.

So, here are the advantages of this minimal micing method:

• Only three tracks
• No temptation to fix in the mix (‘turn up the high-hat mic! turn up the maracca mic’)
• Great stereo image
• If your drummer sucks (and my drummer is me sometimes), you’ll have to just PLAY BETTER rather than tweaking already recorded sounds. I.e HIT THE SNARE HARDER. Hit the high-hat LESS HARD. Etc.
• No crazy-ass phase cancelling to fight with.

SO, the sound? Click below. I had fun with phasing, distortion, and stereo delay too…

Thanks to Jordan and Dominic for the micing assistannce.

UPDATE 1/31/09 – MY ‘default’ sound now adds a close-mic on the snare top, usually the classic SM57 or maybe a really directional mic like the Audix OM-6 to keep high-hat bleed to a minimum…

I’m also getting some interesting sounds by ‘treating’ the kit – for one song, hanging tambourines off of the kick so eack ‘thump’ of the bass drum has a tiny jingle from the tambourines, or stacking change and metal things on the snare head for recording a break-down section…