Quote:
Originally Posted by Raoul23
How was the overhead sound with ceilings at just 8ft?
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Shockingly, it was decent and I never had an issue. I did a few things to get the best sounding drums I could(good enough, is never good enough
). Knowing the room wasn't great, I never bothered putting up "room" mics and instead, created the room sound with an AUX track and a short room reverb(most any room can do, but I really like the IK Classik Room at around 356ms of decay). I would send the entire kit(with less, or no bass drum) to the reverb plugin. Snare and/or toms would sometimes get a separate reverb as called for by the song. I also replaced the toms with my own "one-shots" of the very same toms(the toms sounded great, but I wanted to remove the bleed of cymbals to give me better control of the mix). If you have a drummer that can hit the toms hard, but hit the cymbals light, you could skip this, but most drummers I know hit the cymbals as hard as they can, no matter what you suggest
Also, if you track toms with top and bottom mics, you can lean on the bottom mics for tone/sustain(instead of cleaning off the tracks completely). For an example, check this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdKBcleNLWk
Note that I did not mix it(was mixed by Michael Wagener and Robert Wright). The kit was a Mothertone kit(Schleishman from Australia) with a 20" BD, 10", 12", 14" toms and a Black Beauty snare. IIRC, Cymbals were all Zildjian A's. This song was tracked with only top mics on toms.
One more thing to try re overheads: if you use SDC's, point them up at the ceiling(@45 degrees) and put the capsule as close as you can without touching the ceiling. This recreates the effect of a boundary mic(PZM) and can work really well. I used LDC mics about 10" away from the ceiling with reflexion filters between the mics and the ceiling.