The only tweak that I made was distancing the mics to about 40″ from the center of the snare instead of two drumstick lengths, because the length of two of my sticks is only 32″, which put the right-shoulder mic in the path of one of my crash cymbals.

I also had to change my bass drum beater from the hard plastic side to the felt side, because the mic over my right shoulder was picking up a “clicking” sound from the impact of the beater on the bass drum head. After doing that, everything sounds great. I’m looking forward to recording some new stuff with my band using this technique.

You really need to either simply position, listen, position, listen and so on until you get the sound you’re looking for – or even get one of those fancy phase tools to simulate the same thing – or align things digitally.

The #2 is a misquote:

2. Place the overheads in a position which is in-phase with the kick,snare and overheads.

is the actual quote.

Phase is unavoidable. The point of recorderman (and glyn johns) setups is to control the phase so that the overheads are not diminishing your sound by having OHs that are equidistant to both the BD and SD. You could do the same technique to, say, your tom. So now the tom would be amazingly in phase with other things diminished a bit because they’re out of phase.

The reason this technique is preferred is that the snare and bass drum end up being the least “positional” in your mixes. You center those, the other instruments’ phase is then natural and real sounding because they play off of each other’s relative positions around the kit. The small tom will be louder on the left mic than the right mic, and a bit less coherent phasewise than the snare. Sounds about right!

You could, for instance, ignore the rule here that sets the OH volumes equal and position the mics wherever you’d like, and balance the snare drum and bass drum using volume level. But that’s the point — doing that takes hours and hours of trial and error and you can see the obvious issue of bias and volume randomness depending on the song, the dynamics of the drummer and reflections in the room. With the equidistant methods, it mathematically corrects everything.

The mic on the front of the bass drum will not necessarily be out of phase with the overheads. You do need to position the microphone (and adjust phase settings at your disposal) to bring out the bass drum.

One thing to remember is that flipping a phase switch is a 180 degree shift. It works great if you were perfectly out of phase… but, what if you were 97 degrees out of phase? Now you’ve merely shifted to 83, not much of a difference.

So whichever method you use, you still need to do phase checking to either get the MOST diminished signal you can at the proximity you want and then flip that 180 switch, or look for that fat signal.

Another thing to remember is that recorderman’s specific quick setup biases a few ways: Your hihats are going to be hot, as well as any other cymbals that are near the snare. They’re simply much closer to that mic than the ride/crashes that would be near the low toms.

This is where the aiming of the capsule comes in to play. You can keep the snare / BD centered but aim the capsule at different things to change the bias. If you’re in a small room or are recording someone who bashes cymbals (or someone that has live/rock cymbals and not recording/light cymbals) you do *not* want the mics aimed at the snare center. The reflections of the hats onto the snare will mess up your stereo imaging bigtime (they’ll phase). People, even recorderman himself in that thread, have gotten good success out of pointing the mics where the beater hits the bass drum or at the toms: of course, this makes the snare way less punchy — but that’s why you have the snare top mic.

In order for that to work would a kick mic need to be on the beater side? I’ve been using a front kick mic about a foot in front of the drum and I need to flip the phase and digitally line up kick mic with the overheads. Once I do this I get a great drum sound but a part of me wonders if it could be done another way.

Sincerely,
Todd

I’m not certain what you mean by “other side.”

This setup is great because, since the mics are closer to the kit than with traditional overheads, you don’t need to worry so much about dampening the ceiling reflections. (Though if you do so, the sound will be that much tighter.)

> Should I just send the mics into a dual mono-to-stereo cable and adjust the panning in the mix?

Ya, you can record them to a single stereo track. Or two separate tracks, and pan them hard left and hard right.

Depending on the mix, you may not want a wide stereo image of the drum kit, in which case it’s easier to use two separate tracks, and pan each appropriately.

> but what if i ever wanted to add more mics to the setup?

The 2 mics in this setup will be your overheads, so you can add additional mics just as you would in other drum-miking arrangements. Generally, you’d add them in this order, depending on the number of extra mics you have:
kick drum
snare top
room mic(s)
hi hat and/or ride cymbal
individual toms

(Though of course it also depends on what the song requires. Sometimes, for example, the ride cymbal or hi-hat drive the rhythm, in which case it can work better to forego the snare and room mics and focus instead on capturing the cymbal detail.)