Hey guys, in this video we’re going to continue on our drum recording series.
We’ll be setting up a multi-microphone drum recording over the next few videos, and in
this video we’ll start with the overheads.
The overheads are arguably the most important part of a drum recording.
Done properly, they allow us to capture the entire drum kit, which can then be reinforced
with individual microphones.
For the audio equipment I’m using, everything in this series will be running into a Focusrite
18i20 and a Behringer ADA8000, which gives me enough inputs for the 9 microphones I’ll
have by the end of the series, but you can use whatever audio interface you have available
as long as it has enough inputs.
There’s two general ways we’ll look at how to setup our overheads in this video.
The microphone techniques we’re using are a spaced pair configuration, and an X-Y configuration.
I’ll be using the two small diaphragm condenser microphones from my CAD drum mic kit for this,
which really aren’t that great of overheads, but they will get the job done.
Let’s start with the spaced pair setup.
For this setup, both microphones are pointed straight down at the kit.
One is on the left of the kit, and the other is on the right.
You can vary the height of the microphones to adjust how much room sound there is, and
in this case I’m keeping them fairly close compared to what I can do.
The one thing we want to keep in mind here is phase.
If we can the microphones at a different distance from the center of the snare, this can put
them out of phase with each other, turning a thick snare sound into a complete mess that
can be really hard to correct afterwards.
To get by this, we simply take a tape measure and measure the distance from each microphone
to the center of the snare and make sure they’re the same.
Here's the sound of the overheads.
This gets us a fairly wide sounding overhead recording, and that’s one of the main advantages
of a spaced pair technique.
We can really hear this with the cymbal.
The other configuration is an X-Y pattern.
This basically involves centering the two microphones over the kit a few feet up and
putting them at about 90 degrees to each other.
An X-Y configuration is a little trickier to setup, since the microphones need to be
really close to each other, at the same height and angle as much as possible.
There are rigs that help with this, but this can be done with a set of regular microphone
stands.
This configuration gives us a narrower stereo spacing, but the advantages is we won’t
have any phase issues because the microphones are in pretty much the same spot and the sound
reaches them at the same time.
It’s also gives the best sound when brought down to mono, which is actually pretty important
since the listener doesn’t always get a perfect stereo representation depending on
what setup they’re using to listen back to the music.
Overall, both these overhead techniques give us a good starting point to build our drum
sound around.
Compared to our single microphone technique, we obviously get a stereo recording, but it’s
still a little plain sounding without any reinforcement of any parts of the kit.
We’ll start on that in our next videos by adding individual microphones.
Thanks for checking out this video on recording drums with overheads in the home studio.
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