Out of the Box Drum Miking Techniques Part I

The purpose of recording anything is to be able to faithfully represent what a source sounds like in a given space. Now, there are many different methods one can take to achieve this.

With drums, for instance, many professionals prefer to put a microphone on every piece of the drum kit. This gives them the opportunity to tinker with and adjust each individual aspect of the kit without effecting the other elements of the kit.

While this can be extremely useful when wanting just a touch more high hat or a little bit more of the crack from the snare drum, it can be time consuming setting up microphones when in the studio with an impatient paying client not to mention all of the additional mixing time needed to balance the kit.

This is where things can get creative for the engineer. There are many different established methods that utilize fewer microphones and are still able to capture the essence of the drum kit. The two methods I will be discussing in this post are the Tchad Blake Method as well as the Glyn Johns Drum Recording Method.

Tchad Blake is a Grammy award winning recording engineer working with artists such as The Black Keys, Elvis Costello, and Sheryl Crow to name a few.

Tchad's method involves using a singular microphone to capture the entire kit. While using only one microphone makes it a challenge during the mixing portion of the project, if you work on the correct placement and getting a good sound from the onset there should be no problem with using this technique.

The microphone used for this method is a large diaphragm condenser microphone set to a cardioid polar pattern. It is placed directly above the kick drum and pointed towards the snare. Placing the microphone here ensures that it has a focus on the snare with enough bleed from the rest of the kit to have a nice balance of kick, cymbals, and hi hats added in.

The result from using this setup is actually pretty surprising. It takes very little adjustment to get a good balance of the kit. When using this method, I did find that the low end was a little bit lacking on listening back. There was not enough kick drum presence for my taste. To enhance this setup for my use, I reinforced the kick drum using a Shure Beta 52. This enabled me to capture every aspect of the kit with a lot of balance using only two microphones. I encourage you to experiment with microphone setups even when using an established method like I did by reinforcing the kick drum. You will tend to be a happier engineer.

Please join in the discussion and tell me about your favorite techniques for miking a drum kit, and be sure to check out my next post where I will go into detail about the Glyn Johns Drum Recording Method.