Mono Room Mic Placement

In an ideal world we d always be able to record drums in a great sounding room one of a decent size that with just a little knowledge of mic technique makes it almost effortless to capture the sound of a live drum kit enhanced with nice room ambience.

Mono room mic placement.

Placed tight on the shells. Place two or more mics around the room as spaced pairs. If i m going stereo for drum overheads i ll likely stay mono for my room mic so that the overheads and room mic sounds don t step on one another s toes aurally too much in the mix. Place a mono mic in front of the kit about 6 to 12 feet away.

When in doubt use your ears reevaluate your mic placement and make adjustments to get the results you want. What do you want to hear. 16th november 2006 3. A great way to start is the recorderman method or the glyn johns technique.

To emphasize one part of the kit or another raise and lower the mic accordingly. In fact i just tracked a song for our duelingmixes members with mono overhead and mono room mic. If your aim is simply to provide your entire mix with a bit more depth a mono room mic squashed through a fet compressor will do the job. Joesi on july 3 2013 at 1 58 pm.

Any time you have microphones covering the same sound source from different distances you re likely to run into some phase problems as the offset in distance causes the sound to reach the microphones at different times. Ambient miking can really make your drum sound even when you re not blessed with the greatest of spaces. Experiment by moving the mic farther away from and then closer to the kit. Start the same rough distance from the snare but with the mic facing the space just above the kick.

But if you ve got two mics to spare for a room setup combining a far away mid side configured pair with a mono overhead also makes for some very. I had been stuck on a mono room mic mainly because i like getting the vintage crushed room thing going on but another engineer tracked some drums in my place recently and worked out some good stereo micing in my room which i hadn t really messed with before. He acheived a little more of a wide modern sound that way. This placement offers a different kind of natural representation of the kit this time favoring the kick over the snare.

Use your ear to taste. Place two mics in an xy mid side or blumlein pattern far from the kit. Matt ross spang episode 1 setting up the live room getting sounds. Working at the legendary sam phillips recording studio in memphis tn matt discusses the mono overhead mic he s using on the drums one of only three mics he s got on the kit.

Any distant stereo image i need can be achieved with pzm mics on the floor or walls or by using a figure 8 ribbon for overheads or a combination of all of that. Of course this can be avoided with careful placement and measurement.