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so it is about 80%–90% closer to his voice than the guitar. The guitar mics are a pair of DPA 4011 at about the 12th fret and approximately 6" back. These mics were actually left out on much of the record. In the song I have provided, they are actually off, but they were useful in some songs, if only for an added touch. The first room mic is the same type of Manley Cardioid Reference mic I used for the vocal and is about 5–6' away, directly in front of the artist. The other two mics are Manley Gold Reference mics about 15' away and split. They are set in a in figure-8 pattern. When placing the mics, I wandered about the room listening for the particular sound I was wanting to capture with each mic, and that is precisely where I placed the mics. Use your ears.

Miking drums in a live-session context
The next projects I want to share have to do with drum miking. One project is Michael McDonald’s remake of Neil Young’s “Down By The River”. It was all tracked live including Michael’s vocals; the only overdubs are the background vocals and a little bit of Hammond B3 organ. The other songs are from Jeff Bridges’ album Be Here Soon. I recorded almost all of the sounds on Be Here Soon in stereo, and would place the instrument or

vocalist in front of the mic according to where I wanted to pan them in the mix. This really gives some nice depth and phase coherence. The drum sounds you hear in the shared files were recorded with the majority of the sound being captured by one stereo microphone placed just over the head of the drummer. Here’s the deal: I want to capture what the drummer is hearing. If the drummer has good technique, I want his dynamics and volumes, not what some engineer thinks they should be! One of the tragedies of multitrack recording with drums is that the levels and sounds of the drums can be manipulated to where it doesn’t represent what the drummer played at all. This could be a really good thing if the drummer doesn’t play well and, say, hits his tom too hard when he should be hitting soft, or vice versa. But in the case of a drummer who has real groove and feel, his dynamics will be lost by close-miking his drums and then panning them as mono signals in a mix. Not only will the true stereo field be distorted but also the time domain gets distorted. The close mics vs. the overhead mic/mics will have a radical time-arrival difference. There are some very clever boxes that can help line these signals up, but the realism of what the drummer is

hearing at his head, and the stereo field, can’t be reinvented. Now having said that, there can be some cool sounds and effects achieved by isolating mics, etc., but that is not the purpose of this article. Although I have recorded drums with only the single stereo mic as an overhead, the recordings I am sharing use a slightly different technique. In addition to the overhead stereo mic, a Manley Stereo Gold Reference, I place one mic (an AKG D112) inside the kick drum near the beater, and two mics (Manley Gold Reference) split in the room about 12' from the drums. Unlike the solo acoustic artist, where I used very little of the additional mics, I use quite a bit of the rooms and the kick mic in addition to the stereo overhead. The overhead mics were set up in a blend of figure-8 and cardioid, the rooms were full figure-8.

Get inspired
I hope these simple ideas inspire you to try getting away from the multitrack approach and capturing what the musician hears in the room. Have fun! Chris Pelonis (pelonis@recordingmag.com) is a recording engineer, studio designer, and the mastermind at Pelonis Audio, creators of the Model 42 coaxial near field monitors and other models.

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Recording - May 2012

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