Mono Room Mic Placement

This placement offers a different kind of natural representation of the kit this time favoring the kick over the snare.

Mono room mic placement.

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. Ambient miking can really make your drum sound even when you re not blessed with the greatest of spaces. Start the same rough distance from the snare but with the mic facing the space just above the kick. Of course this can be avoided with careful placement and measurement.

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. He acheived a little more of a wide modern sound that way. Use your ear to taste. Matt ross spang episode 1 setting up the live room getting sounds.

16th november 2006 3. 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. 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. 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. 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. I enjoy a mono room mic anywhere from 6 20 feet back 4 10 feet high dead center on the drums. Place two or more mics around the room as spaced pairs.

Joesi on july 3 2013 at 1 58 pm. Experiment by moving the mic farther away from and then closer to the kit. Place two mics in an xy mid side or blumlein pattern far from the kit. 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.

When in doubt use your ears reevaluate your mic placement and make adjustments to get the results you want. 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. Place a mono mic in front of the kit about 6 to 12 feet away. Sometimes the simplest setup is the best one as you ll see in this excerpt from start to finish.

Placed tight on the shells. By moving our room mic closer to the floor we accentuate the proximity effect resulting in boosted lows.