Hey my name is Ryan and you are watching
Creative Sound Lab. A weekly video show with recording tips, pointers and off-the-wall
recording techniques.
This episode is actually the start of an entire series on mastering the art of recording drums
without samples.
I am going to teach you my practical methods and advice and I even have a really cool case
study at the end of it all. This is a five part series that talks about recording drums.
I realized that I have never really made a video that really covers stuff top to bottom.
So todays video I am going to give you three steps to mastering the drum overheads and
I will go ahead and give you those steps.
Step one is divide the drums. Step two is to decide on the height and step three we
are going to be choosing the technique that you want to use. So let us go over the studio
glass and talk about how you can slice up a drum kit in half.
Here we can see the typical image of the drum kit. If I were to record the drums as they
were set up on stage, then most of our stereo image would be on one side. The low floor
tom and the ride cymbal would be on the other side.
The idea is to ignore way the drums are facing and look at ways you can divide the drums
so that the important ones are right down the middle.
One way to do this is to point the drums, or better yet, move the imaginary line to
come in at a different angle. If we draw a line so that it goes over the bass drum and
the snare drum, we can see that it looks a little funny but it actually gets us the most
important drums in the center of the stereo image. We also have a ride cymbal which is
slightly off to one side, and the Hi Hat which is slightly off to the other side.
The crashes and toms form a nice variation from side to side that keeps things interesting.
In this example you can hear what it sounds like when I divide the drum kit up visual
down the middle.
[Music - Deep grooves]
In this example you can hear what it sounds like to split the kit down the auditory middle.
You can hear that the kick and the snare are right down the middle and the ride and hi
hat are pretty close to the middle but on complementing sides.
[Music - Pocket Grooves and Funk]
The idea is to get this left and right image how you like it, and then bring in the close
microphones to fill in what you already have in the in the overhead microphone.
For example, if you could only pan your Hi Hat microphone to the exact point that it
appears in your overhead stereo image would you be happy? This is why it is important
to split the kit the way that you plan to mix it.
The mixing process is starting right now and it is with our overhead microphone.
[More deep grooves and pocket drumming]
Step 2 is to decide the height of your microphone. Is your room a nice room or is it a little
rough. You can easily control the direct drum sound and indirect drum sound that you record,
just by adjusting the height of your microphones.
My standard height is a little higher than me when I am standing. If I move the microphones
and little closer than that, say five feet away, I would get a wider stereo image and
a little bit more direct sound.
If I were to move a little bit further away, say 7 feet away, I get a narrower stereo image
and I capture less direct sound. Here is an example of having overhead mics a little bit
closer to the drums, and it is a great way to cover up a bad sounding room.
[Music]
Here is an example of overhead microphones placed a little bit high and they can capture
the room sound in a very pleasing way that does not smear the drum sound.
[Music]
Step three to mastering overheads is to choose the technique that you want to use. There
are many ways to set up two microphones to get a stereo image. I am going to cover the
most popular ones for the four different schools of thought that I could divide this in to.
It is Coincident, Near Coincident, Spaced, and Asymmetric. And if you are unfamiliar
with any of these I have all of these covered in the downloadable PDF for this episode.
The XY technique is a coincident technique, meaning that it captures sound in a single
three dimensional space.
It is a pair of cardioid microphones that are angled at 90 degrees. It is really common
on hand held recorders and it is great for summing to mono if you need to. For some reason
people seem to like it, but I have always found it a little bland to my taste.
[Drumming]
A big brother to the XY Technique is one that I actually use a lot and that is the Blumlein,
where instead of cardioid microphones, it is two Figure 8 microphones. For whatever
reason I love this a lot more. Because this is still two microphones in a single horizontal
plane, it is still considered coincident.
If we were to stand this microphone on it is side, where we have one microphone pointing
strait down, then we have MS Technique. You can refer to my other video about the MS Technique
and how to do it.
If you were to use two microphones that are not at a single point but separated they are
called Near-Coincident. One popular technique is ORTF, where it is a pair of cardioid microphones
that are 17cm apart and 110 degrees.
If you are in the US, that is 6.5 inches or a touch longer than a dollar bill. The
idea is that the distance of these microphones, is not perfect, but it has some pleasing phasing
issues that resemble the human hearing.
[Amazing grooves and Pocket]
The little brother for the ORTF is the NOS Technique, which is just a little bit wider in the way
that you place the microphones.
There is actually other techniques developed by multiple broadcasting companies around
the world such as RAI, DIN, Olsen, and EBS. I will put all the info for these techniques
in the PDF download for this week. My point is that you really do not have to worry about
which one that you use and feel free to change this up.
[Cool grooves]
The next technique is spaced pair, which is like unlinking the two microphones and moving
them to wherever they would work best. The method that I use a lot is to use a string
and measure to each microphone to make sure the snare drum is between the two.
[Drumming]
Finally the fourth school of thought for overheads is the asymmetric pair. This is the Glyn Johns,
Recorderman, and McTear methods that have an anchoring microphone up top with a complementing
microphone off to the side.
These techniques split the drum kit from the side and use distance to split the drum kit.
These techniques I either have covered, or will covered in Creative Sound Lab epsidoes,
so check the description for those links.
In short, the Glyn Johns is really great for classic rock and a minimal drum micing technique.
The Recorderman is great if you do not want to use a kick mic, and the McTear method is
actually apart of a whole family of measured microphones that I want to show you as a case
study at the end of this video series of recording drums.
[Music]
Ok, so I am sure that your head is just spinning right now and I am going to give a quick review.
The key take-aways of this video are: Step One, divide the drum kit. This is really the
way that you are specifying which way is left and which way is right in the kit. Really
what do you want to be right down the middle.
Step two is to decide on the height. How much room ambience do you want coming into those
mics.
Step three is choose the technique. There is Coincident, Near-coincident, Spaced Pair,
and Asymmetric so just choose your technique. That is one two and three steps that you can
follow, and you are going to find that you like to do your own technique, and some of
the measurements you can just eye ball such as the ORTF measurement. You do not have to
use a tape measure every time you want to set that up.
You do not have to learn all the stuff that is in the downloadable PDF, you can use that
as a reference, but really focus on keeping the session going. You do not want to waste
peoples time setting this stuff up. Just do your best and it is really pretty forgiving.
Remember that the overheads are not just for recording cymbals, this is key. They are for
capturing the foundation of your drum track. In essence you have an outline created by
these overheads that will be colored in by the sound of your close mics.
In the next weeks episode I am going to be talking about phase and polarity. This is
not easy if you are not sure how to approach it, so I have developed three steps that really
break it down one piece at a time of what you should be listening for and how you should
fix different issues that are happening when you set up a bunch of mics on a kit. So I
really hope that you join me next week. It is going to be a really cool series of mastering
the art of recording drums without samples. That is key, because it definitely can be
done. So I will see you next week.