Although it’s entirely possible to get a great recording of a drum kit with one mic, more often than not a multi mic’d sound will be required. Can you get a genuine multi mic’d sound if you only have one mic? Incredibly, you can. Find out how right here…

Using multiple mics on a drum kit is the accepted way to get sounds with the control, immediacy and ‘pop’ that most of us associate with the sound of recorded drums. While it’s possible to pick up a really usable set of mics for this purpose for very little cash, the amount of time and money spent on getting sounds with these starts to increase, mainly for the following reasons:

• Close mic’ing is far less forgiving of any drum tuning and/or damping that needs attention. Putting drums under the microscope requires time and skill to address this.

• Putting up mics on everything increases rig time proportionally for each mic you add, even if everything works and mixes nicely.

• Adding mics also requires the budget for extra stands, cabling, and multiple inputs that are also needed.

Drum Replacement And Augmentation

Sometimes, close mic sounds either sound less than their best, or the choice of drum or tuning might not agree with everything else. In another scenario, there can be a need to augment a one mic recording that started out as an idea. Even in the latter case it is possible for individual drums be swapped out in the mix for other recorded sounds, maybe from another session or kit, or from a commercially available library. Up until recently, generating MIDI data from a one mic recording was only possible through more time intensive editing and processing.

Using whatever software is available, we can generate MIDI events from existing hits to trigger plugin instruments (or even hardware machines or samplers) to augment or replace the existing sounds. Drum gates are ubiquitous when it comes to cleaning up spill on close mics, and some can even generate MIDI notes for this purpose.

Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate

So is it possible to create individual MIDI for individual hits with a single plugin on a single mic recording? Step forward Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate…

This breakthrough plugin has been with us since October 2019 and uses machine learning AI to discern between different kit pieces. This is distinctly different from conventional gates that work primarily on input levels coming into the plugin, making the Oxford Drum Gate a big departure from what we can expect a drum gate to do. You can read more about some of the things that can be done with AI in our article.

The great news is that the plugin does away with the guesswork and editing or strip silence headaches for cleanup or for when trying to extract meaningful MIDI data from recorded drums. In the video you can see just how easy it is to get a great sounding close-miced drum sound from nothing more than a mono drum overhead.

Final Thoughts

When demos grow into records, or when budget dictates a limited list of gear, the Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate is the hands down winner if you need to get a multi-mic’d drum sound against the odds. Head over to Sonnox for more information.