In a sea of soundalikes it can be hard to craft a sound for yourself. But as technology makes it easier to make music, instead of running with the pack, why not forge your own path and go back to the old school?
Adding some real passion by harnessing the talents of a real-life rhythm section is actually much easier than you think. This guide to recording a drummer's performance on a live drum kit will take you through the steps required to do it simply and effectively.
We’re going to swerve the process of finding a drummer and teaching them how to play (we’ve plenty of other articles for that) and instead concentrate on how a modern computer-based producer can embrace a little old school stick-smith magic. Incorporating real drums into your music could give it the lift you’ve been searching for.
Your only necessity is a system able to record multiple mic inputs all at once. That is, a decent computer equipped with an audio interface with at least four (or ideally eight) microphone inputs. And – of course – a series of drum mics to plug into them.
Got your gear, a drummer and a drum kit? Let’s do this.
1) Start Here: Essential kit maintenance
It’s much easier to get volume, clarity and brightness from a new set of drumheads. If possible, get them on, tuned and ‘played in’ a day or two before the session.
And different types of head give different types of sound: single-ply heads are bright with less sustain (ideal for jazz/pop); two-ply heads are deeper and more controlled (rock/metal); coated heads are warmer in tone (disco/'70s).
Your choice of sticks or hotrods and felt or wood kick drum beaters will also have a big effect on the sound of the kit.
The trick is to get as close to the sound you want with your ‘raw’ kit, before you even think about mics and recording.
Check that the head diameter is exactly right (fractionally larger than the drum) and that it’s mounted perfectly centrally.
Always make tension adjustments in opposite pairs to avoid forcing the head off-centre. Seat the head by applying gentle pressure with your palm to the centre, then tune out any new wrinkles that appear.
Wherever there are two heads – a skin on the top and bottom of the drum – you have three possibilities.
If you tune the bottom (resonator) head of a tom to the same pitch as the top (batter) head, you’ll get a purer tone with more sustain – perfect for jazz and its derivatives. If you tune the resonator lower, you get a slight pitch drop-off and less decay – great for rock.
Tuning the resonator higher shortens the decay further, which can be great for close miking.
A good starting interval for the difference in pitch between heads is a minor third - ie, three semitones either way.
2) Kick drum secrets
The front (resonator) skin on the kick drum is important for creating a good, meaty tone and most rock/poppers have a hole cut in it to allow microphones and dampening material (a small blanket, say) to be placed inside.
For metal styles, where you’re mainly looking for click and thud, you may as well just remove the front head so that you can get a mic right in on the beater point.
You can tighten up your kick drum by creating a chamber for it using blankets, duvets or even a coat. Place your mic and then cover your kick (and the mic) using a couple of mic stands to hold the blankets up.
This chamber (no matter how rudimentary) will prevent the spill from the cymbals and snare getting into the kick drum mics, making it easier to boost the high frequencies at the mix stage and thus enhance the ‘clickiness’ of your kick without adding harshness from the cymbals.
3) Where to record
Before you even set up the drum kit your first consideration has to be your recording environment. Perhaps more so than any other element of your music, the room around your drumkit plays a vital part in setting the tone for your music. Go in close and you’ll get that tight ‘disco’ sound that pop recordings love. Or keep your distance and let your drums breathe in the air of the room for the big expansive sound of modern rock.
So pick the room most suited to your music. A small space that barely contains the kit will give you that tighter sound you’re looking for, while setting up in a hall or garage will give you a big powerful ‘thrashy’ sound.
If you’re making a rock track, you’ll need a ‘live’-sounding room or an adjacent live-sounding room where you can put ambient mics. If there’s a rug on a wooden floor, get rid of it – drums always sound better on a hard surface.
Or record ‘tight’ then add your own reverb and effects later, giving you ultimate control of your music. But if you know you want it ‘loud and loose’ then you really can’t beat the real thing. Meanwhile, for a dry, disco-sounding kit, you’ll need a ‘dead’ room, like the lounge or bedroom, where soft furnishings help to calm the sound.
The true nature of your sound then comes down to mic placement – even more so than the kit you’re using or your drummer.
4) Getting your mics right
Of course, any mic can be used to record drums but for true, professional results, you can’t beat some tried and tested classics which have been used on countless hit records.
The Kick
For example the AKG D112 (and its many copies and soundalikes) is pretty much THE go-to microphone for recording a kick drum. Able to withstand high sound pressure levels and with an EQ tweaked to capture both the kick’s ‘click’ of impact and its round, warm body, it’s tailormade for capturing a modern kick drum sound.
The closer it is to the beater contact point, the punchier a sound you’ll get – 5-6" away is about right, at a 45º angle to the batter (top) head. A small boom stand is ideal for this.
And, although it might sound like overkill, do consider using a second mic on your kick. Take another mic (dynamic or condenser) and place it outside the kick and you’ll get a much more rounded and meaty sound. Don’t get any closer than 5-6" to the skin, though. And be sure to weigh both kick drum mic stands with bricks so they don’t flop around during the performance.
The Snare
For your all-important snare drum, a Shure SM57 is a great go-to. This dynamic cardioid mic is perfect for capturing the full sound of your snare close up.
Place it close to the skin and try to have it looking in and down onto the centre of the head. You’ll need to keep it outside or near the edge of the drum so that it doesn’t get in the drummer’s way of course. If this angle isn’t possible, try having the mic looking horizontally across the snare.
Again, using a second mic works wonders in filling out the sound. Try placing a mic vertically under the snare drum to capture the rattle of the snare itself. If your overheads are doing a great job of capturing your kit it could well be that this extra snare ‘detail’ mic is the slider you’ll reach for.
One important thing: If your audio interface has a phase reverse button, activate it for this mic’s channel so its output doesn’t clash with the sound of the other mic.
And Toms?…
If you’ve got the inputs and the mics you can do the same for your toms too. Just follow the same process as per the snare, above.
The Overheads
So called because they’re… overhead… Two mics placed above the kit will capture the whole kit’s sound and become the most important part of your set up, capturing all the drums, all the performance and a lot of the room too.
Ideally use a pair of large diaphragm condenser mics on tall stands two or three feet above the kit and about four feet apart to form what’s known as a ‘spaced pair’. The AKG C414 is a tried and tested workhorse for this. Use your mics in omni-directional mode to capture more of the room ambience (if you want it) or go for the cardioid mode to give your drums more focus.
Top tip: One of the classic drum mix problems is too much cymbal at this point. But the solution is simple: Just record your crashes afterwards. That way you can bring up all the exciting roominess of the drums themselves in the mix, then blend in some perfectly recorded cymbals afterwards. As long as they share the same bus compressor no one will ever know that they were recorded separately (although be prepared for your drummer to hate playing without cymbals).
Add some ambience
It’s useful to set up an ambience mic some distance from the kit. This will mostly capture the room and – even if it sounds great or not – can go some way to injecting some live ‘feel’ to your drummer’s performance. Simply pull up its fader and its warts-and-all ‘live’ vibes could/should add a pleasing new depth to your drum sound.
Try putting a mic in an adjacent space that’s bright-sounding, like a bathroom, kitchen or corridor. You can even delay this signal with a delay effect which can be used to create an illusion of size.
The Mix
Of course, only you know how you want your drums to sound so experiment with the exact positions of the mics above. And be mindful of phase. You need to ensure that the sounds from your drums get to all of the overheads at roughly the same time. The more mics you use, the more complicated the phase relationships get and the less focused the sound can become, leading to a loss of punch and low frequencies in the recording.
Simple repositioning and redirecting your overheads can work wonders for clarity and impact.
5) The Recording
By now you’re hopefully all set up and your mics are plugged into your interface and your basic mix is sounding good.
It’s finally time to start recording.
Recording to a click track – that is a simple metronome track already recorded that your drummer can play along to – may sound like you’re cramping their style but recording to a click makes it much easier to edit between drum takes at a later stage. And with the drummer in charge (being kept in check by a click) the entire band will tighten up.
If you’re recording the whole band playing at once it’s best if only the drummer gets the click. Using a little beatbox or percussion groove usually makes a better ‘click’ than an actual boring DAW metronome… And will also spill over into the microphones less.
And if your song has quiet passages be prepared to dip the click track in the drummer’s headphones so it doesn’t get recorded.
With your click track ready, it’s finally time to let your drummer have a test run and beat the hell out of the kit and bear in mind that they’ll always play louder on the actual takes.
Insert a trim or gain plugin into each of your drum channels for extra control. Having the highest peaks spike at around -5dB is a good target.
Once your levels are sorted, it’s a good idea to run a test recording to check for silly mistakes and any uninvited hum, hiss, clicks or crackles. You can also use this test to check the phase of the mics and ensure a fully fat sound on playback. Here’s how to do that:
Bring up the first kick mic, followed by the second. When the two are balanced, try inverting the phase on the second kick channel (the left/right Phase Invert icons). Then simply leave that button set to where it sounds best.
Now do the same for your overheads.
Bring up the overheads, panned centre, then try inverting the phase of one of them. If the overheads sound fatter with just one channel phase inverted, leave it like that.
Bring the kicks back in and blend them with the overheads. Change the phase on both the overheads now, and leave them set at wherever the kick sounds fattest.
Balance in the top snare mic and switch the phase to whichever setting sounds fattest with the kick and overheads. Bring up the bottom snare mic and set the phase to the opposite of whatever the top is set to. Repeat this process with any tom and ambient mics.
And you’re all set! You should now be ready to press the record button, safe in the knowledge that you have the sound of the drums completely nailed.
6) Tricks for your mix
Of course, your drum sound and drum mix is entirely up to you, and dependent on the music you’re creating. But you can’t go far wrong introducing these tried and tested mix tips for a fuller, more professional drum sound.
Try creating two auxiliary sends and returns from your ambience track. Insert a delay plugin over the first return and set the L and R Delay times to 30ms and 60ms.
Next, insert a room reverb over the second aux return set to around 0.6s Decay Time. Compress this and add a harmonic distortion with your choice of fattening plugin.
This artificial space will help the kit sound more ‘finished’ both in the final mixdown and while you’re tracking – and a more exciting sound will make your drummer play better.
Next take your individual drum channels and the two new aux returns and set their outputs to a new bus. Create a new aux return for this bus and call it ‘Kit Master’. This is your main drum channel. You can do the same for the rest of the band too – creating guitars, bass, vocals, etc mix faders.
With five or six ‘master’ faders, it's much easier to get a good working balance and hear the drums properly in context. You can also create a separate sub-mix for the drummer this way by adding aux sends to the master faders and routing them discretely to their headphones.
To minimise latency, keep your audio interface buffer size as small as possible.
And that's it!
Above all, just remember to:
• Get your kit (and drummer) sounding as good as possible before you even consider recording
• DO record to a click track. It'll save hours of mix and edit effort later
• Problematic cymbals? Simple. Record them separately
• Mix systematically. Get a good drum mix on a single Auxiliary fader and then simply add this perfect combination to the rest of the band
Good luck!