This can be simply done by pure listening. Again, no rules here. Do what works. Here are few things to look out for. These sort of problem usually occur in smaller rooms with parallel walls. Listen carefully for the harsh sound bounces, as you hit a snare drum with a drumstick.
Move around the room and listen for areas in the room that you hear that harsh feedback ringing. Thus, you might find the brightness of the drums, especially the sizzle of the cymbals become too annoying.
In this case, get a few acoustic panels to compliment the already set bass traps. Acoustic panels are thinner and do almost nothing to absorb low frequencies. However, they are usually cheaper and you can use them to cover parts of your studio wall which are not padded.
A quick trick is to use the acoustic foams to make your studio walls as uneven as possible — killing any parallel walls. This way, sound bounces around your room more randomly, losing the reflection — thus deadening reverbs in the room.
Ironically after putting up acoustic panels in your studio, you run into the risk of having a dead, unnatural sounding room. Diffusers allow reverb to decay more naturally compared to sound absorbers which simply absorbs the sound energy. They can also help make small rooms appear to sound larger. As you alter the reflections that occur in your room, sound bounces around more irregularly, taking a longer time to reach back to your ears. That gives you the illusion of a bigger room. While a one microphone technique for recording drums work, sooner or later, you are going to outgrow it.
Audio interfaces are generally external sound cards, that are built for professional audio recording. But why do you need an audio interface? See, ideally, you want to be able to individually control and mix every drum component during mixing. Sure, getting an affordable analog mixer would do the job, but you would have to mix onboard. Albeit like a spaceship!
This will allow you to mic and record the drum kit from numerous angles and positions. Another suggestion that I found worked for me in the past is to get something that does it all. Zoom makes a lot of devices like this, for example, the LiveTrack L But it works. You can actually record great audio with it and besides, when its time for more, you can invest in separate hardware pre-amps to compliment.
Generally, the crucial components of the drum that needs to be recorded are the bass drum and snare. Got extra budget? Then slowly invest in extra microphones and mic up the other components, hi-hats, cymbals and tom-toms.
Yes, cheap drum microphone kits like this actually work. Not something you want for a recording. I learnt this early on in my recording career. Rather than getting cheap drum kits like this, it is wiser to start with one better microphone and then buy more microphones more as you go. I recommend starting with a condenser microphone like the Audio Technica AT Why not other budget condenser microphones?
Your second microphone should be a dynamic microphone. The SM57 is often used to record snares. In fact, it can be used to record any drum component with pretty good results. Finally, consider getting a pair of overhead microphones to record from the top of your drum kit.
With budget in mind, you can do this with a pair of large diaphragm condenser microphones, like the Audio Technica AT However, the job of overhead microphones is usually to capture the brightness of the cymbals and also the overall image of the drums. And small pencil condensers are usually fitted better for this, as they record more naturally. With all your microphones and audio interface in place, the next steps is to experiment on microphone placements.
Try different placements and just record. Start with your overhead mics, placed just above your head, but not too close as to hit it. This will capture the whole kit and the sound of the room. The basic idea of mixing is to blend these overheads with the tom, snare and bass drum mics to create a nice mix. You can monitor the level of each microphone on the corresponding channel in the DAW.
Get a good sound fix any EQ problems, give it some more smack with a compressor, and maybe use a touch of reverb to widen it up and then move on to the rest of your mix. This was how mixing went many years ago — fast and to the point. Seems like a good dream if you ask me! With all this talk about recording drums with only one microphone, you might be asking a pretty obvious question: what kind of microphone should you use?
The two main choices would be a condenser microphone and a dynamic microphone. Condenser microphones are more sensitive than dynamics. If I were you though, I would simply start with whatever microphone you already own. There is no need to go out and buy something new for drums. The microphone you use to record vocals or guitar will get the job done for drums as well. The key is as we mentioned a moment ago, finding the right place for the microphone - not which microphone you use.
What say you? How many mics do YOU typically use to record drums? And have you ever tried just using one? Let us know in the comments below!
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