Micing Drums

[Offlimits]

I know this may be a stupid question. How do you connect your drum mics in order to get the best sound? Basiclly, what equipment do you use between the mic and the mixer, if any to get the best sound. My friend and I have a bet. I just want some other opinions.

Thanks
Rick

[riksylvania]

you mean a cable? I am kind of partial to XLR cables, myself.

[Offlimits]

no, I was told to connec the mics to a small mixer, than to a compressor/noise gate, like Alesis 3630, than to the the main mixer. But I don't know if that works real well. I am looking for suggestion on the best way to get the best sound from the drums.

[Killjingle]

use the inserts on the mixer instead; your signal path with a second mixer and inferior cables will not give u optimum sound

[riksylvania]

I run mine through outboard tube preamp and then compressor. The line inserts on a mixer work best if that's what you're working with.

[floodcitybrass]

use a gate inserted on the bass drum and toms (so you need 1 gate for each channel). That will control the envelope and make it so it doesn't ring. Eq it to your liking.

[BloodyFingers]

You canrecord them straight into your daw and then add all the compressors and gates in there. It works for me that way......

If live i would just use a gate to kill the ringing.....Send alll the drums to a sub so once you have them all balanced out you can turn them all up and down at one time.....

[Jones]

Hire a good tech so you don't have to worry about it.

[hicksjd9]

You don't want every drum to go through the same signal path. It seems simpler to run it through a sub mix (small mixer), get everything equalized, and then run into one channel of your board, but that is deceiving. I would think that would be ok (still not the best) for live gigs, but for recording, you don't want every drum going through the same channel. It's actually harder to dial things in for your gate if you don't have each drum on a separate channel. Each drum will have a different overtone you need to get rid of and you can't just put a blanket gate on all of them, because it will take good sounds away from your other drums making the drum mix sound "dead" or choppy.

[riksylvania]

you definitely need everything you can get on a separate channel. I've recorded drums with 3 channels before with great results; 1 overhead, Beta 52 on kick, and sm57 on snare. If you don't have individual sends for each channel on your mixer, you're kind of stuck. If you do, you can send the signal through the mixer, effect send, then gate, EQ, compression, etc, then to recording input. I usually compress a little to make sure the signal behaves, then do all the gate and EQ work in the mixing process.

[lonewolf]

I recommend a mixer with inserts so you can put your dynamics processing on each drum channel. You need a separate dynamics processor channel on each drum channel. There are also a lot of digital mixers out there with built-in gates & dynamics that you can assign to each channel.

You won't necessarily need a compressor on each drum channel, but you should put a gate on each drum channel. This not only cuts the ring, but more importantly, it helps prevent a mic from picking up stray sounds meant for other mics. In other words, it helps drum channel separation.

You can get a (gulp) 4 channel Behringer, 1U dynamics processor for under $100 on eBay.

Another method that works well: One processed channel each for bass & snare drums plus two channels for a stereo pair of very hot high quality overheads like Neumann KM84s. Lots more ambience that way.

[KeithReynolds]

Never Never Never record anything with something affecting the signal. Thats called 'Printing the effect'. You never wanna do that!!! Always record as raw as you can within reason so you arent stuck with an effect on the track. Add all that stuff afterwards, that way you can undo anything. Obviously different guys do things differently, but it make more sense to me to not record something with any kind of effect on. anything you can do to a track as you are recording it, you can do after you record it. Atleast afterwards youre not locked into a certain sound.
Gates, compressors, reverb , Eq and everything can be added after you record it.
If you dont feel like gating drums, do some good old drum editing. I always remove parts from tracks that i dont need or something i dont want. You get really clean drum tracks by editing.