How To Record Drums That Actually Translate

The recording space

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that you have your drum kit set up in an appropriate room for tracking it as dry as possible, with purpose-built or makeshift acoustic damping in place. This is a crucial starting point, as removing unwanted reverberation from any recording can be very difficult, whereas adding your own ambience is as simple as loading up a reverb plugin.

If, on the other hand, you’ve chosen a specific room because you want to capture its particular reverberation in the recording, none of that applies, of course. We’re also, incidentally, assuming that your drum kit is properly tuned and maintained, as should go without saying.

Microphone placement and selection

By far the most involved part of multitracking a drum kit is selecting and setting up the many microphones required to assign each drum to its own mixer channel. How many mics you can realistically bring into play will come down to your budget and the specifications of your audio interface (see below), but at a minimum, you should aim for one per drum, and an overhead pair for cymbals and ‘air’. Ideally, though, you’ll be able to use two mics each for the kick (one inside and one outside, to record and subsequently balance the beater impact and the body of the drum) and snare (top and bottom, for the stick impact and snare rattle), as well as a single mic on each tom, and the aforementioned pair of overheads suspended about six feet off the floor and each a foot or two out to either side of the snare drum. Tom and top snare mics should be placed a couple of inches in from the rim and pointed at the centre of the head, while kick mics will call for some experimentation in terms of positioning, depending on the kind of drum sound you’re after, the size of the drum, and whether or not it has a front head.

As to what kinds of microphones to use, go with dynamic mics for the kick (AKG D112 or Shure Beta 52A, for example) and snare (Shure SM57), dynamic or condenser mics for the toms (eg, Shure Beta 98, Audio-Technica ATM25, Sennheiser MD 421-II), and condensers for the overheads (AKG C214, Shure KSM141).

Audio interface and ADAT expansion

Every bit as important as the microphones positioned around the kit is the audio interface into which they’re all plugged, and the main thing to consider in that regard is the number of inputs you might need. With its eight analogue mic preamps, the EVO 16 is well equipped to handle a small drum kit – a four-piece, say, with spot-miked toms, kick and snare, and a pair of overheads for cymbals. For larger setups, and/or when you just want more multichannel separation, hooking up an EVO SP 8 (or two!) to one of the ADAT ports on the EVO 16 expands it up to 16 (or 24!) channels of pristine analogue input, which is enough to record even the largest kit in exquisite detail – assuming you have the requisite number of mics to feed into it, of course.

Setting gain levels

Getting a punchy, polished drum mix means capturing the cleanest multitracks you can at the recording stage, with a healthy signal-to-noise ratio. This is achieved by setting the gain for each mic preamp so that the loudest hits on its incoming drum peak at around -12dBFS, which makes good use of available headroom without risking clipping the converters. The EVO 16’s Smartgain function automates this potentially laborious task by setting the gains for any or all preamps for you. Start by pressing the Smartgain button, then select the preamps you want to set. Then press the button again and play the drum kit for a few seconds, as loudly as you intend to for the actual recording. When the Smartgain button flashes green, it means all input gains have been set to peak at -12dBFS and you’re ready to rock. It’s a massive time-saver for any recording session, but especially drums, which can get very complicated with all those channels bleeding into each other.

Phase alignment

We’re not going to get into the weeds of mixing in this article, but one preparatory stage that shouldn’t be overlooked immediately after recording is ensuring that all the individual channels of your carefully tracked drum kit are in phase – ie, that the peaks and troughs in the audio waveforms line up with each other correctly. If, for example, the peaks in your bottom snare drum channel line up with the troughs in the top snare drum channel, or the overheads are out of phase with the individual drum channels, the result will be a comparatively weak, thin sound. Happily, this insidious issue – called phase cancellation – is very easy to sort out. The mixer in your DAW may well have phase invert buttons on each channel, which flip the phase of the waveform on that channel when activated, so that peaks become troughs and vice versa. If not, the same thing can be done by nudging any out-of-phase audio clips very slightly left or right to line them up. And for a more high-tech solution, take a look at Sound Radix Auto-Align 2, which takes care of all your phase alignment needs automatically.

With your multitrack drum kit recording laid out and edited in the arrange page of your DAW, you’re ready to mix, balancing levels, and deploying EQ, compression and reverb to shape the frequency content and dynamic profiles of individual drums, and the kit as a whole, and place it in a suitably vibey virtual space. For more on mixing drums, check out this tutorial.