Recording - January 2014 - 22

along with all the bass trapping one can manage. I really didn't want to
have to record in a 1970s style drum booth-totally dead sounding. On
the other hand, the bounce off of the walls in a small room just screams
"THESE DRUMS ARE IN A SMALL ROOM". I find diffusors really help
make the walls much less specifically defined.

degrees). But I had the drummer (me), the drums, and
the mics, and considering that the #1 snare mic in the
world (the Shure SM57) costs about $100, that's not
that hard to put together. Sure, a big, great-sounding
room would be great-but I played on tons of sessions
in "real" studios with the drums stuck in a drum booth

You can hear it
Using Big Fish Audio's excellent Electri-Fried Blues sample collection I
put together a short demo to track drums over. Using the setup described
above I captured a take of my drum performance, printing each mic to its
own track with zero processing. Then along with the mix of all the nondrum instruments, I also made a very rough mix of one approach to mixing these drum tracks. All of these tracks will be made available to you
online at tinyurl.com/RecMagJan2014DrumMiking.

"For some projects, I'll have
the drummer bring a kit that
suits the project better than
my house kit.
As an example, on Carolyn
Martin's upcoming record,
drummer Tommy Wells
brought out a 1930s Radio
King drum set, a marvelous
kit with sounds that cannot
be duplicated with a contemporary drum set."
-Dave Martin
not much larger than my setup.
I read for years about how essential mic pre quality
was to capturing good drum sounds. How lesser pres
will round off the leading edge of the transient that
starts each note. How mic pres sort of functioned like
water pipes... for all the sound to flow unrestricted
from the mic to the recorder a Big Pipe is required.
Lesser mic pres act like small pipes-pinching off the
sound, making it sound small and dull.
Fortunately our DAW software provides us with the tools
to measure and observe this phenomenon pretty easily. To
compare two different mic pres, put a mic near a snare
drum, plug it into each pre and record a few single hits of
the drum. Matching levels to some degree would be best,
but not really essential. Now use the DAW's wave editor
to really zoom in on the beginning of each note-right at
the front edge the main blob of the note should be a spike.
How sharp is the top of that spike? And how far above the
bulk of the note's waveform does it extend? The sharper
and higher this transient extends the better.
Catching transients accurately is, of course, a big
deal with recording anything. But with drums, it really
is a very, very big deal. Anyway, all of this is to say
that when recording drums, mic pres matter a lot.
Small-room drum recording
The biggest tip I would have when recording in a
small room is to add as much diffusion as possible,
22

RECORDING January 2014

Unlike many sessions where I do some or all of these, on this example
I've done no editing, comping, Beat Detective-ing, or Flex-timing-the
tracks (for good or bad) are as played in one straight-through pass. All
with the idea of giving you something to play with, to balance, tweak and
massage into whatever you can come up with.
All the tracks share the same start time and the tempo is 108 BPM. So
place them in any DAW, putting each track at the same start point, and
they should all line up. Have fun!

Dave Martin
Dave Martin (martin@recordingmag.com) owns
and operates Java Jive Studio in Nashville, and runs
the studio's label Cuppa Joe Records. He's also a producer, engineer, and session bassist, and writes for
Recording. Learn more at www.javajivestudio.com.
Like most engineers, I have a 'go to' approach for
miking drums-a basic setup that has not changed
a lot in the last few years. That's not to say that it doesn't change, though.
I merely tend to start with the same mics in the same places.
The basic setup
Here at Java Jive, there's a house drum kit which is used on about 90% of
the projects we do. The house kit is a Pearl, with a 22" kick drum with 10", 12"
and 13" rack toms available, and a 16" floor tom. Most of the drummers who
work here use one rack tom (typically the 13"); the others are available for those
drummers who want to use a bigger kit, or use different-sized drums on their
own set. But I digress-here's my 'standard' drum miking setup.

http://www.tinyurl.com/RecMagJan2014DrumMiking http://www.javajivestudio.com

Recording - January 2014

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