Drum miking 101

To mix drums, you need to understand miking techniques. There are two fundamental types: close and ambient.

Close mics are positioned to capture the direct, ‘isolated’ sound from one drum or cymbal in the kit. The other drums will inevitably be picked up in the background – this is called bleed or spill. While it usually needs to be reduced with EQ and gating, you don’t necessarily want to eradicate it entirely, because a bit of bleed makes the kit sound more natural and cohesive.

Toms and cymbals are almost always single-miked. One mic inside the kick drum is sufficient, but some engineers also use an outside kick mic and maybe a special ‘sub’ mic to capture the low end. These can be blended to taste in the mix, provided they’re in phase (which we’ll come on to shortly).

The snare drum most often uses two mics: one on the top head and another underneath, pointed at the bottom head. The latter captures the sound of the snare wires rattling, while the former captures the ‘thwack’ of stick striking skin. When mixing, you can process the top and bottom mics to achieve the desired balance of oomph and sizzle.

Ambient mics capture the sound of the whole kit from a particular perspective. Overhead mics are the most commonly used – typically a stereo pair placed above the kit. You may also encounter room mics, which are placed further from the kit to capture more of the recording space’s natural reverb.

Turning all these mics up at once will lead to undesirable interactions between the channels. This can be reduced using gates (to silence the signal between each hit) and EQ (to remove frequencies that belong to other drums/mics) on individual channels.

The fundamental (lowest) tones are particularly important in conveying power and punch, so high-pass filters and EQ can be handy to ensure that the fundamental tones of the kick and snare are supplied mostly by their internal and top mics respectively. For much more on miking drums, see the Recording Drums feature on p34.