How to record and mix a drumset with 2 microphones (with video sample)! PART 1/2

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article! 

In these first summer weeks, as I have written also in our Facebook Page, it is going to be a bit harder for me to post with regularity since first I went for a holiday, next I'm going to move in another country for work, so I apologize in advance if this will cause a slowing down in my posts for a while.

...Anyway, I have today accepted the challenge of helping some friend of mine to record a scratchtape with one prog-metal song they are writing, and doing it all with two directional, dynamic microphones, no virtual instrument. 

We have started trying some of the most common dual miking drum recording technique that can be found online: 

- the one with one mike outside the bass drum and one vertically set 1,5mt from the drumset, towards the center

- the one with one mike pointing to the kick drum beater and one above the shoulder of the drummer

- the one with just two overheads

...and so on.

Eventually I've come to the conclusion that in our case the best thing to do was putting one mike inside the bass drum very close to the point where the beater hits and another one next to the snare drum, between the hi hat and the toms.

This way I've been able to record two decent mono tracks that were tracking evenly the whole drumset (except the floor tom that unavoidably sounded lower than the rest of the set, but still clearly audible), and the result was surprisingly good: in the next part of the tutorial I will also post the mp3 and explain the way I've mixed it.

By the way we have used the same microphone (a Shure Sm58) also to record the amp, a Mesa Boogie Studio 22+ combo using the single microphone technique, and we will use it for vocals too.

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/2


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