How To Mic a Drum Kit For Live Sound

I got an idea let's take the loudest person on stage and cram a bunch of microphones all around him today I'm staring out of mic drums did you get the best drum sounds of your life now it all starts at the source so be sure to check out this other video on how to tune the drums but after they're tuned mic placement and mic choice are your best bet for getting great tone out of your drums I mean I love EQ but I'd rather fix it the source hey if you're new you're going hit subscribe and being a little bell to get notified every time I post a new video you'll be glad you did [Music] so let's jump into my keema kick drum now for any other drum you can use just about any instrument mic you want but for the kick drum you have to make sure that it's got extended low frequency response now I've had a lot of success with the Audax d6 and the AKG d112 but other ones work too like the ones from sure Audio Technica sennheiser electro-voice there's a whole bunch out there each mic has its own flavor but it's got to fit your drummer the drum and the sound that you're going for with the kick drum we're trying to balance snap punch and sustain there's basically two methods you can use you can go inside the kick drum or outside the kick drum on the front head inside the kick drum you're gonna get more beter sounded more snap while outside the kick drum you're gonna get more punch and sustain now I tend to use EQ to compensate for whichever one I'm using but in live sound there's a special consideration because we've got giant subs not too far from the drum kit there can be feedback coming in through the kick drum microphone if you got it cranked way up if this is the case I'll put the kick drum mic inside the drum and crank up the bottom and on the board this is just a safety issue because I don't wanna have to deal with feedback now the thing we're trying to avoid with the kick drum is a cardboard sound unless you're mixing jazz but if you're mixing jazz at church maybe I should come to your church you'll get the most cardboard sound right in the center of the drum head so I try to avoid that spot now even on the inside of the kick drum you can still have some tone control by moving the mic closer to the beater head or further away to get either more or less snap one more thing to look out for on the kick trump is to make sure that nothing is touching the resonant head anything touching the sound hole can make it tear and that'll destroy your sound faster than Michael Vick leaves with Peter Ali now one other thing that's a little less conventional is to use a pzm or a pressure zone microphone on the inside of the kick drum with a regular large diaphragm microphone on the outside this gives you the punch and snap on the inside while getting the sustain and the beef on the inside sure and Crown make mics that are designed specifically for this and I found this PB one lying around in the shop and gave it a try so gonna listen stick it in there on some of the dampening and we'll make sure that this cable is up and out of the way I'm gonna put my kick-out mic over here and when I flee vacu inches so that I've got some room in between there I never want to touch the drum head I'm gonna put the cable over this on the mic stand for that so that it's not touching the head you see there it's not touching now when a snare drum is mics just right it gives me chills now snare drum has a few different parts to it and the more you mix it the more you'll be able to dissect the different areas so we're making the snare drum you got a couple different variables you've got the angle you've got the distance from the drum and you've got the position over the rim now directional microphones are brighter when they're on axis so the more you point the mic right where the stick hits you're gonna get that initial transient the more you suit it across the drum you're gonna get more of the top end from the resonance as well and again this is kind of like splitting hairs but after you do it for a long time you'll really get to dial it in now when you point the microphone down at the drum at a steeper angle it seems a little bounce here and I really like the sound of that I'm wondering if it's because of the diaphragm and the drum head resonating with each other but either way I don't love it alright so here we got three snare drum microphones there are different angles you can see they're all about the same distance from the head or from the rim but the different angle makes a difference in the drum tone now when it comes to height I like to set my microphone capsule about two fingers above the drumhead you can use one finger or you can use something else to measure but this is built-in on me if it's on me all the time unless I borrowed money from the Irish mob and got some fingers cut off when it comes to my kite the closer you are to the drum the more you're going to get some proximity effect higher up off the drum it's going to be a little bit thinner closer down is going to be a little bit thicker [Music] now the position over the rim and the drumhead makes the difference - I forgot to record this when I shot this with Travis but basically the further in you go into the middle of the drum you're gonna get a different tone rather than when you're by the rim I like it right over the rim and it just works now the other thing you have to think about is rejecting the hi-hat because the drummer is probably bashing on there right there and it's right next to the mine now if you have a cardioid microphone you'll want to point the back of the microphone as much at the hi-hat as possible this is gonna give you the most rejection other microphones are super or hyper-cardioid and so they'll have an off-axis rejection to the sides a little bit more it can be a little bit tighter pattern and get you a little bit more rejection here let's listen to the sm57 and the beta 57a and hear the difference between the two now in the name of science let's swap the positions on those C and see if there's a difference there too [Music] now for the snare drum you could use an audix i5 and that wouldn't make me mad at all but if you can't get a snare drum to sound right with 57 it's not the 57 fault it's your fault now if you're feeling funky and you've got the mics you can try an electro voice re 20 or a sennheiser 441 the 441 gives you a lot of focus and the re 20 gives you punch for days it's awesome you should give it a try now the snare bottom is not a completely necessary mic there's usually enough of a snare sound coming into the top mic but if you want it here's what you can do I tend to place my bottom mic at about the same position as the top mic but at a 90 degree angle so if my top mics coming in like this I'm gonna set my bottom mic like this and I'm gonna try to get the capsules to be about the same distance from the drum heads now remember you've got to flip the polarity on the snare bottom mic or else you're gonna lose all your bottom end and no amount of EQ is gonna bring it back [Music] a57 works great on the snare bottom but if you're wanting something a little bit brighter you can try a small diaphragm condenser but be careful if you compress this too much you can get noise from the kick drum and that can get a little annoying now one other thing that can take it up a notch is to line up the snares with the drum line this can make it a little awkward for your drummer to hit the snares on and off but hey it sounds better and you get a little bit more of that pop out of it now on Tom's the same principles apply the steeper you have the mic pointed the drumhead the more attack you're gonna get but if you have it pointed more across the drum you're going to get more resonance and sustained [Music] now the Onyx d2 and d4 are fantastic Tom mics but there's one thing that I don't love about them and it bugs me just a little bit the mount makes it so that the capsule wants to be further in on the drumhead than I want it to be I want it to be right over the rim just like I have it with the smear drum so to do that you've got to kind of bend it in a weird position and crane it back and it probably bends back while the drummer's hitting it anyway now because we've got rack and floor tops for Tom's are much bigger and in general a bigger drum you want to come a little bit further off the drum again you can use your fingers as a guide to select the distance that you are above the drum now again this is a compromise because we're not just trying to pick up drums we're trying to not pick up cymbals and I see some guys point the mic right down at the drum head right beside the rim and some guys over at a church in Northern California that's quite popular right now I like to do it that way but it doesn't get me the greatest results the attack doesn't feel natural and it kind of feels choked off so if you run into that try pointing the mic more toward the middle of the drum now it does get you better signal-to-noise ratio so sometimes you just have to compromise now you couldn't gate the Tom's to get the simples out of them but that never really works well for me either it doesn't open up in time or I'm chasing it around trying to get the threshold set just right and then the middle of a set I want to be mixing musically not technically chasing around Tom gates now the real solution for this is actually to move the cymbals higher but you got to convince your drummer to do that now with the overheads you can mine just the symbols or you can overall KITT sound if I can I really like to get the whole kit sound for my overheads that way I have a whole lot more texture options and that's really exciting even if I don't quite get the kit just how I want it I can always just roll out the high-pass filter and just use the overhead mics as simple mics with stereo overheads you generally want to use a space to pair and live sound because of the noise on stage or the reflections from the drum booth I don't usually use X Y or a mere coincidence for making overheads the space pair gets me the best signal-to-noise ratio and the driest cleanest cymbals in a minute we'll head over to the nerd zone so you can learn how your ears hear things in stereo and you can learn how not to set up your overhead mics in today's nerd zone I'm gonna teach you how to not be ridiculous with your overhead mics they can get a super wide stereo image let's dive in there are three things that your brain uses to tell which direction something's coming from timing intensity and frequency balance your brain is a timing supercomputer so we can hear the difference between the sounds arriving at one year versus the other since sound travels at 1,130 feet per second when your ear hears a sound coming from one side before hears at the other side it thinks hey it's coming from that direction if a sound is louder in one year than the other that's another way that we can tell what direction it's coming from this is why your pan knob works lower frequencies can bend around your head and reach both ears but higher frequencies can't so when we have a higher proportion of high frequencies coming from one side rather than the other that tells our brain hey it's coming from this direction so here's why using a space pair and pointing them toward the center of the drum kit is wrong when the drummer hits the crash symbol on the right side of the drum kit the sound travels from that cymbal and arrives at the right microphone first the sound does arrive at this left microphone later however it's not any darker than it is at the closed microphone because this symbol is on axis to this microphone however when we point our overhead microphones straight down or even away from the center of the kit we're utilizing mics polar pattern to reject more of the higher frequencies coming from the other side of the drum kit so we're still getting the timing difference but we're also getting a tone difference and that is why you shouldn't point your overhead microphones to the center of the kit that's it for nerd zone now back to safe for everyone nerd levels so if you space out the overhead so that they look great from the front you're not gonna have the kick in the snare in the center of your stereo image and yes the beater sound of the kick drum does come through the overhead mics so to fix this I like to orient the center axis of the overhead mics along the kick and the snare it might look a little funny but it gets you a great stereo image I tend to measure from the center of the snare drum to get this to happen this way the snare drum is arriving at both of them at the same time having the snare drum arrive at both mics at the same time make sure that it's in the center of the stereo image and it makes sure that they're at the same phase now when you have more than one eyebrow I mean when you have more than one microphone on a sound source you have to worry about the face when you have one microphone close and one microphone further away there's gonna be a timing difference between Windows microphones pick up the sound source this timing difference can turn into a phase cancellation so when you're setting the height on the overhead mics listen to it with the smear drum mic so that you can make sure that the phase isn't cancelling out sometimes you can flip the polarity to fix that and sometimes you have to actually just move the bikes now if you're wanting to just like the cymbals just like the cymbals try to get the mics about the same distance from each of the symbols so that they sound balanced the Jesus culture method to do this is to measure with a drum stick from the cymbal to the overhead mic [Music] [Music] some people will try to mic from underneath the cymbals well that might look great no really gun that sound great for me your mileage may vary now I love serial over hips but sometimes you just have mono and you got to roll with it in this case you just have to put the mic in the place that picks up all the different symbols about the same then there are other situations when the overhead mics are just there for show because so much is coming through the singer mics anyway even in those situations still put up the mic anyway you never know when a drummer is gonna come out with the shaker all right so let's hear all the results I'm gonna have Travis play groove and I'll isolate each mic and let you hear Maul in context but before we do if you want help getting your sound team set up for success download my free guide how to lead your troops sound team the links down in the description below Travis [Music] and hey if you got more drum miking tips drop them in the comments below I'd love to hear from you be sure to hit thumbs up if you like this video thumbs down if you hated it share with a friend hit subscribe meaning a little belt and we'll see you back here next time [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Attaway Audio

Views: 139,283

Rating: 4.9292874 out of 5

Keywords: live drum mic techniques, mic placement drums, how to mic a drum kit for live sound, mic a drum kit for live sound, drum mic placement live, kick drum mic placement live sound, snare drum mic placement, drum mic placement techniques, drums, live sound, live drums, overhead mic techniques, drum mics, drums (musical instrument), drum miking techniques, how to mic a drum kit

Id: 4UzX7LqnSjg

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019