in this video I'm going to show you how I set up my microphones in my interface
and my whole setup so that I don't have to leave my drum throne and I could
record drum tracks at home coming right up
in this video I'm going to show you all my mic setup and my placements and how I
route it into the computer so let's go ahead and check out what's going on
overhead microphones are one of the most important set of mics in this whole
setup this is supposed to represent an accurate stereo image of the overall
setup of your drums it should be treated as so and not so much like a cymbal mic
these cymbals are loud enough and if done correctly you shouldn't have to use
an individual spot mic now of course this all depends on the sound you're
trying to achieve but the mic technique I went with is the spaced pair the space
pair is a very common miking technique for drums a lot of people use it and why
it's called the spaced pair is because this microphone and this microphone are
the same height and they're the same distance exactly from the center of my
snare drum so the idea is that this captures a perfect image of the overall
drum sound the way I do that is I take a tape measure and I measure from the
capsule over here to the center of the snare drum which is 40 inches and then
I'll do the same over here so that's basically how I determined exactly where
I'm gonna place these things another thing you want to keep in mind is that
the actual height of these off the ground have to be the same on both sides
otherwise the sound is going to travel to one microphone quicker than the other
and that'll kind of give you some null frequencies and it'll give you some
phasing issues later on in mixing next up in my mic setup is a snare mic I
chose the shure sm57 because it's affordable and it's one of the most
versatile mics on the market this mic is especially great on the snare drum
because of its frequency response and you get a pretty good bang for your buck
remember this microphone isn't necessarily going to sound great on its
own and keep in mind that all of my drum recordings you hear is a combination of
this mic and others in my setup now it's pointing at the center of the drum
because I want to capture it all and it's not directly miking the skin
because I don't want all those extra resonances and I've got
just off of the rim here finger width of two from the height of the rim now this
is a dynamic mic with a directional pattern meaning whatever it's pointing
at it's going to capture the high and the low frequencies moving on to the
kick drum mic this is an AKG d112 mk2 it is like a very well known microphone
kind of like the sm57 in a sense of popularity this is really good on kick
drums it's also really good on bass cabs and floor toms this is the mic I use
I'll show you how I position it here I put it inside the kick drum so I get a
lot of the attack from this position here I don't necessarily point it right
at the center of the kick drum as I don't want all the attack but I do point
it at the outside of the shell where it meets the drum skin so I get all that
resonance it still kind of captures a bit of the attack but I make up for that
with the room mic and a sub kick that I make in the DAW I could show you that in
another video moving on to the Tom's let's go see what those are all about
these are the CAD M 179 s and they're a large diaphragm condenser mic now these
are great because they're relatively cheap and they have some great options
on them there's a little dial here you can actually change the polar pattern
I've got it set there hyper-cardioid because that's the best sounding on the
Tom's there's also a high-pass filter and a pad of minus 20dbs if you don't
want to blow your speakers out or your microphone out you just throw that thing
on especially for loud sonic sources like a Tom I basically pointed down at
the shell I don't want it necessarily right here at the edge I kind of have it
tilted up like this towards the center of the drum because I really want that
stick attack especially for metal that's kind of what I'm going for now these are
great because it comes with a shock mount they're kind of hard to position
but I found ultimately this was the best position on the drums for me got this on
a mic stand here all of the Tom's get them I've got one here one here and then
one over here on the floor Tom now moving on from here we're gonna go and
check out my mono room mic okay so this is my mono room mic the point of this
mic is to capture the ambience of the room and to kind of fill in all the the
spots that your close mics couldn't get so this is the same microphone the CAD
m1 79 on the hyper cardioid pattern I've got this probably
two feet off the ground how I have it centered is aboutt center between my
overheads because it's mono it's right down the center I want to capture it as
equally as possible left and right this will be an essential sound in your drum
mix I mean you can record without a room mic but you won't get that big huge
sound that you're looking for without it imagine it like this you draw a big
center line down between both of your overhead mics and that's where you want
to position this guy now I found that the higher you go with it the more
cymbals you get and the lower you go with it the more low-end you get so I
kind of put it you know about halfway in between so I'm getting a lot of that
boom from the kick drum and a lot of body from the snare of course this is
all good and important but how do we get it into our computer so I'll show you my
setup my interface it's pretty inexpensive I think it was like almost
$700 Canadian which is pretty good for some really really clean sounding
preamps let's take a look at that alright so this is my focus right 18 I
20 and as you can see I'm actually running vocals through it right now to
do this as a voiceover because my camera audio is shit it has 8 inputs one two
three four five six seven eight it's also got an instrument in meaning you
can use XLR balanced line or a quarter-inch and you can just plug in
like a DI and it's got a pad only for these two channels these two front ones
another good thing to note is the phantom power
so those condenser mics require external power and that's what these buttons are
for now if you do decide to use external mics then I would suggest getting one
that has an option to put phantom power on your inputs this is a great option
because we need to hear things back as a drummer and we need to play along to a
click especially if we're doing session work like I do so in this case the 18i20
has two outputs for headphone jacks with individual controls and I run a quarter
inch cable it comes out of there and it goes around all the way over to here and
my mixer and then it goes into this first input here now what's great about
this is you can like take out the high end you can control the level and then
that sends over here to a headphone output you
could also just run it out of the thing and into a headphone jack but I wanted
more control over the level here instead of having to get up back and go back and
forth to try and control it in this case I just control it from the main level
and then it goes to my headphones so when we're doing click tracks or I'm
drumming along to any songs I don't have to get up and go to the computer to
change it up till now it's been about like twenty five hundred dollars
Canadian to acquire all that stuff and that's not including the laptop or all
the plugins that I use in the DAW now don't be shot away from this because
there are some really inexpensive pieces of gear that you can acquire that cost
far less than the ones I have and you can get great quality drum sounds from
them if you want to learn more about drums and drumming related things and
check out this playlist I'm gonna put up here if you haven't already please
consider hitting around subscribe icon and hitting the bell so you don't miss
a thing I'm Cameron and I'll see you in the next video thanks so much