Recording - May 2014 - 17

middle effect" that can sometimes occur
when miking drums with spaced pairs in
particular. I placed the mics at a height
barely above the tops of the cymbals, so
that when the crashes were hit hard, you
could actually hear them moving up and
down, adding excitement. Their pattern
was set to figure-8, which brought a lot of
great room reflections into the signal.

The kick drum was miked with an AKG
D112 large-diaphragm dynamic about 8
inches away, on axis but slightly off center,
into the Avalon Vt-737sp with a 3 dB cut at
30 Hz and a 4 dB boost at 80 Hz. A 3 dB
high-shelf boost at 15 kHz helped pick up
some additional sense of space. 3-5 dB of
compression at a 4:1 ratio was also
applied, with an attack just slow enough to
allow the punch of the drum to come
through, and a fast release, keeping this crucial element stable and focused in the mix.
A Shure Beta 57A was used on the snare,
an inch above the rim, hanging over about
an inch into the head, at a "10 o'clock"
angle to minimize bleed from the hi-hat.
More room excitement was captured by
an Avantone CR-14 ribbon mic (also figure8), placed over the center of the kit at a height
of about 6 feet, which picked up the rack tom
as well as the snare reflections from the vaulted ceiling above it. This went a long way
towards unifying the stereo image as well.
The RE20 was used on the floor tom at
its outer edge at about 4 o'clock, 2 inches
off the head and tilted about 30 degrees
towards the drum's center. This went into a
Joemeek VC1Q Channel Strip, with a 3 dB
boost at 100 Hz and about 6 dB of compression, with a similar attack and release
to those used for the bass drum.
The overheads, snare and ribbon were
all taken straight in, with no compression
or EQ, and only a small amount of duct
tape was applied to the tom heads. We let
the snare 'ring', sans damping.
RECORDING May 2014

A drum kit is a collective sound-one instrument, if you will. The interaction of all
the mics is critical. I tend to monitor them in mono during setup, as this will more readily reveal any phase issues in the form of comb filtering and EQ inconsistencies.
Isolating individual tracks should be avoided, unless you're trying to track down
which mic is being plagued by these audio gremlins.
Once the mics were moved and polarities flipped where needed, I then panned the
overhead mics hard left and right, from an audience perspective. The floor tom was
panned about 10 o'clock, the center ribbon was at about 1:00, kick and snare were
centered.
We moved through the songs in a particular order for a very specific reason. I have
always felt that if one can tune the drums to each song's key, you will find that they
bloom and support in a very beautiful way. We started with the tunes in D, then in Eb,
E, F, F# and G, tightening up the drums as we went. (The songs in A were satisfactorily covered by the E tuning.) This really didn't add all that much time to our sessions
and the results were definitely worth it! To their credit, the rhythm section of Reeves and
Sales performed all 14 songs wonderfully... They tracked them all in a single sevenhour session and I made three small edits in total.

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Recording - May 2014

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