SES WEEK 8 DRUM KIT MICING

I booked 2 hours last Friday morning to mic up and record a drum kit in keeping with last week’s SES. Four of us had made arrangements to meet in the studio to do this, two of whom are drummers. In the event no-one showed up except me and Sam (I am naming no names, here). Our time was not wasted; I discovered that it is virtually impossible to set up a recording session for drums when you have to press record in the studio, run into the recording space and play something, run back to the studio and listen to it, adjust the levels, run back to the recording space and adjust the mics, run back to the studio and press record again…. you get the picture. At this point Sam showed up, bless ‘im, and we managed to spend the last 20 minutes getting something down. Sam and I are not drummers (yet, anyway). This is the (pretty standard) array that we used – there was no time left to experiment:

KD – BETA 52a
RACKS – BETA 56 X 2
FLOOR – BETA 56
SNARE – BETA 57a
HI HAT – NT5
OH’S – NT-5 X 2
ROOM – U87.

Given that it was the same drum kit in the same position as when we did the exercise (this is where I like the kit best in that room anyway), the results were pretty much the same, too. Here are 2 versions:

Sam’s mix down

Dorothy's mix down

I think mine's a bit bass-heavy - something to do with the nice monitors in Studio 2 which let you get away with that sort of thing (until you come home and realise how ridiculous it sounds). I had issues with the floor tom ringing (I reckon it’s somewhere around 700-800 Hz) which I found a nuisance also with my tech rehearsal recording that I did last week.

THANKS TO SAM FOR THE FILES AND PIX!