Drum Miking

[Sable904]

Originally Posted by Sable904

Thanks for the heads up, exactly what I was looking into.

I have the AKG Kick Drum/Bass Microphone. Yet it just does not seem deep enough. I will try a blanket, pillow and see if that helps some. Thanks

[dr_daw]

Originally Posted by Sable904

I have the AKG Kick Drum/Bass Microphone. Yet it just does not seem deep enough. I will try a blanket, pillow and see if that helps some. Thanks

Start with mic placement, then check your batter head and resonant head tuning. Do you have any dampning in the kick?

[Sable904]

Originally Posted by dr_daw

Start with mic placement, then check your batter head and resonant head tuning. Do you have any dampning in the kick?

It is my son's kit so I have no clue what he has yet I will ask him and we will figure something close overtime. Thanks

[Sable904]

Originally Posted by dr_daw

Start with mic placement, then check your batter head and resonant head tuning. Do you have any dampning in the kick?

Which is the batter head, the one in front farthest from the drummer and the resonant head close to the drummer? I know nothing about drums / My son plays them so maybe he knows, not sure. No we don't have any damping like a blanket or pillow inside, we will try that and we will try more mic positions. Were just looking for that thump in your chest, right now it just seems weak and more towards your head. But thank you for some direction on where to start. It just does not seem to have any low frequency. ty

[dr_daw]

Hey Sable,

The batter head is the side that the kick peddle hits, the resonant is sometimes a ported head. This is so you can put the kick mic right inside the drum.

As for that thump, there will be multiple factors in order to get that. As mentioned tuning, but it could also be your monitoring setup. If you room isn't ideal for listening, that thump may actually be there, but it's cancelling things out. Have you checked the kick drum sound in a car, headphones, etc...? In my studio, I use Equator d5's these are a critical listening speaker. If I make a kick drum sound that it's hitting me in the chest, then I end up with WAY too much low end. What particular kick drum sound are you looking for?

Here's a link to some helpful EQ tips:

http://www.presonus.com/community/Le...Terms-and-Tips

Another option that may help you out is Slate drums Trigger or drummagog. Then you can just scroll through a bunch of kick samples and use drum replacement. Getting good drum sounds takes years of practice, good rooms, great sounding drums, good mics and good mic pres.

[Sable904]

Originally Posted by dr_daw

Hey Sable,

The batter head is the side that the kick peddle hits, the resonant is sometimes a ported head. This is so you can put the kick mic right inside the drum.

As for that thump, there will be multiple factors in order to get that. As mentioned tuning, but it could also be your monitoring setup. If you room isn't ideal for listening, that thump may actually be there, but it's cancelling things out. Have you checked the kick drum sound in a car, headphones, etc...? In my studio, I use Equator d5's these are a critical listening speaker. If I make a kick drum sound that it's hitting me in the chest, then I end up with WAY too much low end. What particular kick drum sound are you looking for?

Thanks for the feed back. Now we know the difference of a drum kick. We put a blanket inside. Every thing was going good recording wise then Pro tools froze up. I have a Dell windows 7 l5 core 8 gigs of ram. Back to the drawing board. Looking for a drum sound similar to Children of Bodom. Ty

Here's a link to some helpful EQ tips:

http://www.presonus.com/community/Le...Terms-and-Tips

Another option that may help you out is Slate drums Trigger or drummagog. Then you can just scroll through a bunch of kick samples and use drum replacement. Getting good drum sounds takes years of practice, good rooms, great sounding drums, good mics and good mic pres.

[dr_daw]

When PT's completely locked up, did you get any error message? What interface are you using? What is your playback engine setting? What buffer size? Are you recording to a separate drive?

[Sable904]

Originally Posted by albee1952

This should probably be moved to the General discussion section Some of the answer is dependent on what kind of sound you are looking for(and what the actual drum sounds like). My house kit is a 20" Sleishman drum with a small hole in the front head. I use either an Audix D6 or a Telefunken M82, just inside the hole. I also have a "subkick" in front(a "subkick" is a small speaker of 5 to 8 inches. Mine is an Event 8" woofer, mounted on a circle of plywood and suspended in a 10" drum shell). The subkick is good for extended low end(and not much else) but it can really fatten up the kick sound. Moving the mic further inside can get different tone, depending on placement, and more beater "click" if you move closer to where the beater hits. Any time you use more than 1 mic, you will benefit from time-aligning the tracks. SoundRadix has a plugin for this, but you can also use Tab to Transient to see which track is late, and then nudge it into alignment.

How did you wire the Event 8" woofer to an xlr I presume?

Another approach I saw at Oceanway recently was an AKG D112 in a bass drum with a single head. There was a blanket laying in the drum for muffling and they used a Yamaha NS10 woofer as their "subkick"(wish a took a picture as it looked pretty amusing) I am not personally a fan of the AKG, but it sounded good in that particular drum.

Back to mics for a moment; I have also tried and used Shure Beta 52, EV RE-20 and RE-320, Sennheiser e602 and 421, Beyer M88, AKG D112 and all of these CAN work. But for me, The Audix D6 is my fave, with the M82 a close second(a used D6 is a bargain).

Last 2 cents; it really does start with the drum. My favorite bass drum is the Sleishman "Bop kit". The bass drum is 18". I know you're thinking that must have sounded small, but you you would be way off. It replaced a well-tuned 24" drum and absolutely ate it's lunch. IOW, it doesn't take huge drums to get a huge drum sound

[NealMiskin]

Buy a drum key. They are cheap, like, under ten dollars cheap. There is no excuse for not owning at least one.

Practise tuning your drums. If you don't own your own drum kit, rent one for a few days just to practise tuning them. You don't even need to know how to play them (but it sort of helps).

You will find that there is a nearly endless variety of different tones that you can get from a drum kit just by tuning it, and playing with different dampening options. Even more tonal options are available if you have a selection of different types of drum heads to chose from.

If you can make the kit sound good in the room, you will find it is WORLDS easier to make it sound good on tape, and this will be true regardless of what mics you use.

Everybody loves to talk drum mics and drum mic placement, and these are important, but they're basically moot if you don't know how to make the drums sound right acoustically.