Favorite Drum Sounds

[Nathanael]

I wanna know what some of your favorite drum recording techniques and manipulations are. What kind of sets do you like recording with? What mics? What placements? What rooms? Favorite drum sound on an album? Anything interesting or disinteresting that has to do with drum waves. I'm curious and hope to get some creative ideas.

Anybody used an old vistalite? I have gotten some great snare sounds from a vistalite...

[rockrev]

Well, we could talk all day about mic'ing a drum set, but by far the one thing that I consider a must is the importance of room mics. Unless you want the super dead late 70's kit, room mics are something that just can't be duplicated 100% with plug-ins (there are some good ones, but nothing beats the real deal).

I prefer using M/S to X/Y as I like to have a strong center image (in case I want to crank the room sound and still have focus). My M/S setup is also more of a "front of the kit" room mic setup as opposed to the "back of the room/outside the door" ambience setup (which is usually X/Y). I usually place the M/S setup about 8 feet away, level to the drummer's chest, and aimed dead center. My mid mic is almost always a Rode NTK (the tube saturation levels out the elements of the kit and adds major balls to the kick) and my side mic is usually a Gefell UMT70. I also compress pretty heavy while recording, so they're ready to go for mixing (maybe a little EQ then).

Anyway, that's my .02. I'm sure you'll find a lot of other ideas from others. I will mention that you can always use a single omni pattern microphone to capture a good mono room ambience. Compress the crap out of it and pull it way back in the drum mix . . . it will make a big difference in the sound. That's one option to a stereo setup.

Later,

rockrev

[rockrev]

One trick I recently discovered (and was quite surprised) was mic'ing a drum set through a cardboard tube. We had a rather large (ok, really large), thick, and long cardboard tube (imagine a *huge* paper towel roll), so I decided that it might be fun to stick a mic in it and aim it at the drum kit. WOW!! Very cool - it added an interesting and organic tonality to each drum and gave the cymbals a very strange sound. The length of the tube determines pitch, so you may have to cut some to match the song, but anyway. We recorded some passes and then baked them with Waves Enigma . . . ah, delicious. Keep in mind that this won't be very useful for your average song, but it was certainly cool and perfect for that "different" sound.

rockrev

[superpenguin79]

I forgot which forum I was on when something like this was posted, but see: Bonham, John ....

[Nathanael]

Yes, a friend of mine rebuilt an entire vistalite, only with a smaller kick and the actual vistalite snare. I love the sound of that thing. So much snap in the sound. And the built in damper is tittts.