Brief Summary

Drums are the most complex recording challenge many people encounter. Getting the overheads right really helps as it’s the context in which all the other mics sit. If you’re new to recording drums, or even if you aren’t, here’s where we suggest you start.

Going Deeper

If you’re new to recording drums, or just want some fresh perspective, here’s our take on where to start when it comes to those most important of drum mics - the overheads.

The first thing to point out is the use of that ‘s’ on the end of ‘overheads’. Do you have to use a pair? While it’s definitely standard practice to put up a pair of mics when recording drums, there are lots of reasons you might choose to just go with one.

If you’re new to drum recording, and the title of this article does say ‘start here’ then you might not have a pair of mics. Possibly you have a single ‘best’ mic you’d like to use in preference to your other mics, whatever the reason, capturing drums with a mono overhead can be a great choice. I last did it just a couple of months ago and with a little stereo reverb it gave great results.

A single mic in the right place will sound better than a pair of indifferently positioned mics. A story which illustrates this is a demonstration I used to do when I taught studio recording. Very early in the programme I’d challenge the students to a drum miking race. I’d give them 10 minutes to mic the kit to give me the punchiest drum sound they could manage. After some chaotic activity I’d see every mic in the studio all over the kit with a metal spider of hastily arranged stands surrounding it. The sound was always a bit of a mess. Fair enough. They’d only had 10 minutes and didn’t spend any of it getting organised!

Then I would walk in to the booth, drop a single Crown PZM on the floor and hit record. My drums always sounded punchier.

They would often think it was about the PZM but it wasn’t. The reason was phase. All those mics fighting against each other were causing more issues than they were solving. Stereo width is great, but not at the expense of the tone and impact of the drums. Get your best condenser mic and place it straight over the snare. Experiment with the height, It really depends on how high the ceiling is in the space you’re recording in. Combined with a kick mic and as many close mics as you wish to use, that might be all you need. If it is, the phase relationship between Your overhead mics won’t be fighting each other, because there’s only one.

Stereo

But stereo is cool - right? Absolutely! But phase is still important and it’s for this reason that I really like coincident techniques. If you want stereo overheads, if you put a pair of mics where your mono mic was you can avoid the inevitable phase issues caused by different kit pieces having different times of arrival at multiple mics. There are lots of coincident techniques but the simplest is XY. Take a pair of cardioid mics, small diaphragm condensers are ideal, and place them as close together as possible with a 90 degree angle between them. So each mic is pointing 45 degrees to the left or right of the centre. Get a stereo bar so you can mount them on a single stand as moving the pair of mics when on two stands is awkward. XY sounds great in stereo and importantly, sounds good in mono. A fun way to achieve the much same thing is to use a cardioid mic and a fig 8 to create a mid/side array. I’ll leave that though as this is a ‘start here’ article and it offers similar results as XY but with more flexibility and complexity.

Spaced Stereo

Mono and coincident stereo sound can sound great, but they still don’t match the expectation most of us have of studio drum miking. Surely that involves a pair of mics spaced over the kit? Exactly how you approach placing a pair of mics over a kit does depend on what you are expecting to achieve. Are you trying to capture a stereo picture of the whole drum kit? Are you trying to capture the cymbals to supplement the close mics on the kit? The positions will be different depending on what you’re trying to do.

Spaced stereo recording works differently to coincident techniques. Techniques like XY work like a pan pot, with stereo position being represented by the relative level of sounds in each channel. Spaced pairs of mics capture time of arrival differences. This precedence effect is a stereo cue which helps the brain perceive the direction a sound is coming from because it mimics the inter-aural delay between our ears located on each side of our heads. If the timing differences between spaced mics is too great the stereo image becomes vague and over-wide, developing a ‘hole in the middle’ as sounds move out to the sides. Technically this is a bad stereo recording but might be perfect as a complement for a bunch of close drum mics in the middle of your drum recording, placing a wash of sizzle around your drums. There usually aren’t any rules in audio but when it comes to stereo recording there kind of are. But rules can always be ignored.

If you are recording with spaced mics then omnis are perfect. However lots of people favour cardioids. In a suitable room I sometimes use fig 8 if there are other players in the room. You’ll still be able to hear that guitar amp but it can be helpfully reduced in volume. Something which I’d always recommend is to measure from the centre of the snare to an overhead and to match that distance on the other. I usually use a mic lead while asking the drummer to hold the XLR on the drum head.

There are a couple of very popular techniques which prioritise matching the distance between the mics and the snare, or snare and kick, which often get referenced. The ‘Glyn Johns’ and ‘Recorderman’ techniques are talked about a lot online. I’ve tried them and don’t personally care for them but check them out of you aren’t familiar with them.

There are of course some excellent tools like Sound Radix Auto Align which can help with issues caused by phasing between mics but these are best used as a complement to rather than an alternative to good mic placement.

As well as checking spacing, another essential for me when it comes to placing overheads is placing them over the correct centre line of the kit. Visually the centre of the kit runs straight through the kick drum, but if you look from above, that places the snare off to one side. I place my overheads either side of a line running through the centre of the kick and snare. This feels odd the first time you do it but sonically I think it makes far more sense.

Matching Gain

Something which should be done with care when setting up overheads is matching the gains of pairs of mics. Setting one to the right level, leaving plenty of headroom, is the first step. Then matching the second mic to this first one is essential. Just moving the gain to the same position will get you close but to match it more precisely, as a minimum you should use the peak indicator in your DAW to match the peak levels of a snare hit between the mics. However to get it absolutely right you’ll have to null them against each other. This takes longer but is the only way to guarantee a perfect match. You might think that if your mic preamps are digitally controlled then that is enough. It probably is but if there is a difference in sensitivity between your mics that will not be taken into account. Errors can be adjusted out in the DAW but it’s good to get things right on the way in.

There are lots of things to consider here and exactly how you approach setting up overheads depends on whether your drum sound uses overheads to add width and sparkle to a sound principally built on the contribution of the close mics or whether you approach it the other way round, with a drum sound based on the overheads, augmented by the contribution of the close mics. Both are legitimate choices.

Photo by Robert Gareth on Unsplash