Recording - May 2015 - 12

How to record drums in a classic configuration heard on timeless hits
By Michael Schulze
I still have a picture of myself as an infant in 1963, before I could walk, smiling
proudly at the camera and standing by pulling myself up on my Dad's very expensive Hi-Fi cabinet. It was a lovely blonde wood box with a radio and turntable
inside and a single loudspeaker mounted on the front. I was probably skipping a
Frank Sinatra record by doing so, which would have amused my mom but caused
my dad to spill his Beefeater Martini.
That's the way we listened to music back then: with a single loudspeaker and a Martini.
Studio recording was done with multiple microphones, but in the end all these signals had
to be mixed to a single channel for monophonic records and radio broadcast.
The magic of mono
Mixing to a single speaker presents specific challenges. For example, in stereo
mixing you can pan two identical sounding acoustic guitar tracks hard left and right
for clarity via stereo separation. However, in mono mixing you must make those
two tracks sound different enough to be distinguishable while sitting right on top of
each other. Most likely you would record the two guitars differently, and maybe
equalize them differently, making one brighter than the other.
In the early to mid-'60s, most rock bands were still recording their music pretty
much as it would be played live. Johnny Cash sang and strummed an acoustic guitar in front of an acoustic bass, drum set, and Luther Perkins's amplified Telecaster.
Luther's guitar had been modified by its previous owner, and the volume knob was
disconnected. The only way he could control dynamics was by palm muting the
lower three strings as he doubled bass lines and simultaneously threw in the upper
three strings of the same chord voicings Johnny was playing. These four musicians
produced very different sounds and as such the mono mixes sound very clear and
full, still very satisfying to this day.
The late 1960s to early 1970s saw bands like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and
eventually Led Zeppelin making recordings with many more layers than a three or
four piece band could play live. Mixing was complicated, without automation and
using equalizers and compressors with fewer bells and whistles than more modern
units. So tracks were planned carefully in advance and recorded and mixed by
master engineers who got very good at tucking multiple elements into mono in a
way that kept each element clearly audible, resulting in mixes where each sound
fit into the sonic whole like a big audio jigsaw puzzle.
Stereo caught on in the USA before the UK, and bands like The Beatles had to come
up with a mono and stereo mix of each album to satisfy the demands of the labels. The
Beatles, their engineers and producer would spend days painstakingly creating the mono
mix and then rather quickly pan out a stereo mix. Most home stereo systems had a pair
of speakers mounted just a few feet apart in a cabinet, so there was not much separation
anyway. The Beatles mostly preferred the mono mixes and felt that the stereo mixes left
some elements sounding naked and exposed. Even as mono was being phased out in
the late 1960s, stereo mixes were mostly just monophonic elements panned between left
and right. The drum set might have been recorded with multiple microphones, but might
then end up all in the left channel, as on "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." This came from
the attitude that the drums were simply a single element in the mix... and hey, we aren't
really keen on this stereo fad anyway!
12

RECORDING May 2015

Three mics, one sound
Then came Glyn Johns, a guy who started
his career as a lowly assistant at one of the
busiest studios in London and ended up
engineering and producing some of the
most important rock records ever. His
discography reads like a history of western
popular music and includes recordings with
artists including The Beatles, The Rolling
Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, The
Who, Steve Miller, Joe Cocker, Crosby,
Stills, Nash, and Young (in different combinations), The Eagles, The Clash, Joe
Satriani, Ryan Adams, Band of Horses, and
many others. Glyn's career started right at
the opening shots of the British Invasion and
continues to this day. He was in the right
place and time to get in on the ground floor
and was one of the few who out of necessity invented many of the production techniques we all take for granted today. I enthusiastically recommend his very hard-to-putdown book: Glyn Johns, Sound Man.

Glyn developed a unique method of recording a drum set using only three or four microphones. He used this technique in his mono
days because it made perfect sense. Glyn
would start with a single overhead mic, usually a large-diameter, dual-diaphragm condenser like a Neumann U 67, U 47, or
Telefunken/ELA M 251 (AKG C12). Modern
equivalents would include the Mojave Audio
MA-300 and MA-301fet, the ADK Z-67,
Pearlman TM-250 and TM-47, RØDE NT2-A
and NT2000, or the new Neumann TLM 107.
This mic was set to the cardioid polar pattern
and positioned four to five feet above the
snare drum, pointing straight down as seen in
photo 1. From this mic Glyn would get a nice
balance of the snare, hi-hat, high rack tom(s),
and the crash cymbal on the drummer's left.
However, this mic was a bit far from the
floor tom on the drummer's right. The floor
tom is often played for dramatic effect-think
Gene Krupa, or the iconic drum solo on

Recording - May 2015

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