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Recording Kick

Page history last edited by Randy Coppinger 12 years, 7 months ago

If anything here is confusing, inspiring or absolutely incorrect your comments would be much appreciated.  This is a work in progress and your help improving the information is requested.  Thanks!

 

< Sonics of Kick Drum

 

Acoustics

The space you choose to record drums is a significant part of the sound. Small and acoustically dead rooms tend to be poor choices, such as an ordinary, carpeted bedroom with an 8 foot ceiling. Vaulted ceilings, rooms that “give a little back” can sound very good. Also beware rooms with funky reflections (such as may be caused by panes of glass), adjacent rooms that contribute additional & different ambience and rooms that may sound lop-sided because of uneven distribution of reflective, diffusive or absorptive surfaces (symmetry is important).

 

Very little of this will tend to affect how a close placed kick mic may sound. But it will affect what you can do with your overall drum kit sound and since the kick drum is part of that, acoustics are worth considering.

 

The floor can directly affect how your kick sounds. Some drummers really want a wooden floor. @lobbyshifter suggests a cement floor is better than than a wooden floor, if you have a choice. I've heard tile work very well too.  If the floor couples (vibrates sympathetically) it can absorb and/or ring out at certain frequencies. If the movement of the floor takes away good stuff and/or adds bad stuff, you need to think about a different floor. And floor vibrations can shake your mic too, so think about shock mounts if you can feel the drum hits through the floor.

 

Select mics

There are some common mics used to record kick drum up close. I am a fan of the Audix D6, but there are many other great options: Sennheiser 421, Electrovoice RE20, AKG D112, Shure Beta 52, Shure SM7b, Heil PR40, etc. Whichever mic you choose, be sure it can handle high sound pressure.  Low cost condensers with high output may really disappoint in this regard. You tend to want a mic that has good bass response but isn’t too dull to get some good snap.

 

The benefit of mics made specifically to record kick drum is that they tend to do it well.  But on the other hand, you can’t usually turn around and use that kick drum mic for anything else and enjoy the way non-kick things sound with it.  If you’re working on a budget, you might be better off getting a workhorse mic like the SM7b, 421 or RE20 for the recording flexibility offered. 

 

Another problem with specialist mics is they often have a very tailored sound.  It is usually pretty difficult to change that sound unless you change mics. The general purpose mics tend to take EQ pretty well so they are easier to adapt for different kick sounds.

 

Check out how some kick drum mics sound and the discussion that follows on Episode 89 of the Home Recording Show.

Our signal path for all but the dual element mics was:

Millennia Media TD-1 preamp > Empirical Labs LilFreq (-4dB @ 250 Hz) > dbx 1066 (about 3dB gain reduction) > Apogee PSX-100.

 

You can use more than one mic. You can even use a speaker cone (just do an internet search for “subkick” or “NS-10 kick” for details).  There are lots of fun options for recording kick up close. See if you can get a demo, or buy from someplace with a return policy, so you can be sure to get a mic that works well for your recording situation.

 

There is so much more that could be said about close mics for kick drum, especially matching the mic to the drum. Be sure to read Matthew McGlynn's excellent article: The Six Types of Kick Drum Microphones.

 

Consider too your overhead mics. Sometimes a large portion of the kick sound comes from your overheads. For example, I’ve found that the low end in a pair of the inexpensive Oktava MK 012s can be so good that I used very little of the mic close to the kick drum. My philosophy is: get a great drum kit sound with just the overheads then use the close mics to add what’s missing. Now that’s not true for all styles or circumstances, but it’s my general approach for a cohesive and believable drum kit recording.

 

Oktava MK 012s (cardioid) overhead, 1 meter spread; Shure KSM-32s overhead, slightly more than 1 meter spread.

Pic taken during our kick drum mic shootout at Ditch Road Records.

 

Pre-amp

Like mics, there are some favorite preamps for drums. @JasonMiller0607 joins a chorus of voices who like to record with API.  I’ve also had nice results with Universal Audio and John Hardy.  For whatever reason, inputs with transformers seem to render close miked kick drum very well. That’s not to say other options wouldn’t be great, just noticing common choices as I’ve seen them. A lot of headroom is important here too; you don’t want to distort at the preamp anymore than you want to have distortion at the microphone.

 

Position mics

A kick drum may only have a beater head, it may also have a second head with a hole in it or a second head that is entirely closed. For studio recording, access inside the drum is common. One of the reasons is because veterans often like placing a small pillow or folded blanket in the bottom of the shell. This allows some control over how much the head(s) ring out. The pillow / blanket inside will give you a tighter sounding kick.  It can also reduce ringing of the shell and reflections inside the kick drum.

 

If you can’t place a mic inside because the audience side head is closed, you may want to put one mic on the beater side of the drum and a second mic on the other, “resonator” head to get some of the low rumble. The close, beater-side mic gets the sound of the impact and should be pretty close to where the beater strikes (see pics). The mic on the far side from the beater tends to be further away from the head. Start by putting that mic as far from the second head as the diameter of the head.  Move it further or closer as needed.

 

 

Beyer m201 on beater side

 

Sennheiser 441 on beater side

 

Inside the drum, start by placing the mic element about six inches from the skin so that it points to the spot where the beater strikes the head. I was taught that the mic should be placed at an angle so that the direct “fire” of the beater doesn’t fly straight into the mic. The concept is: you can record the impact of the beater into the head more clearly if you don’t take that gust of air directly on axis with the mic element.

 

Audix D6 with element 6 inches from beater strike

Audix D6 with element 6 inches from beater strike Audix D6 with element 6 inches from beater strike
Shure SM7b with element 6 inches from beater strike

EV RE20 with element 6 inches from beater strike

EV RE20 with element 6 inches from beater strike

 

Listen to the sound you get in close to the beater. Then you can start to move away from the beater, but continue to aim the mic toward the beater, so get more rumble and less “snap”. I tend to stay in close to the beater, but it’s important to find the right balance for each drum, song, player, etc. In other words, there is no single mic position that works every time.

 

You can also move further away from the skin, even outside the shell. I tend to keep pointing the mic toward the spot where the beater hits the head, but you don’t have to. As you move away you tend to get a more complete sound of the kick: beater, head resonance, the thump of pushed air.  The volume goes down as you back up, which is easy enough to turn up, but you also turn up other ambient sounds, like the rest of the kit. So moving away from the skin can mean more bleed.  Not necessarily a bad thing, just something to recognize.

 

Of course you can put a close kick mic up against the head and another mic further back and blend the two. Be aware that if you get the volume of the two mics within about 9dB of each other you can comb filter. Some engineers do this on purpose. Just be aware that two mics complicate matters and be diligent or you may accidentally kill your kick sound.

 

No matter how close or far the mic is inside the kick, sometimes cymbal wash or other kit spill can be more than you’d like in your kick track. One great technique for minimizing high frequency spill in the kick mic is a Drum Tunnel. As I learned it, you take a heavy packing blanket and hang it on top of the kick shell.  Sometimes you need a little duct tape to make it stay, but check with the drummer before you go slapping adhesives on the shell.  The packing blanket drapes away from kick drum and down to the floor.  Sometimes a small footstool or mic stand is used to prop up the middle of the tunnel as it drapes away. The point here is to leave room for your kick mic, especially if it is outside the shell. The blanket edges should lay as flat as possible against the shell and floor to get the best acoustical “seal” you can.

 

Circus drum

Another trick worth mentioning is to bring in another big drum, such as a “circus drum” or marching band drum. Place it in front of the kick, usually within a few inches or as close as you can put it and still get your close kick mic pointed at the beater strike point.  This drum may be even bigger than the regular kick the drummer plays as part of his/her kit. When the kick is struck, the larger drum will tend to vibrate too. Mic this one like you would the far head of the kick, maybe employing a drum tunnel. The additional drum provides more harmonic content for richer, deeper and more complex mix options.

 

Shaping the analog signal

At sample rates of 48k or 44.1k some shape gets lost for fast transients. Whether you can hear the difference or not is debatable, but some believe that compression sounds different when it is applied to fast transients while they are still analog. Even if that is completely untrue, I advocate some analog compression for recording drums.

 

Compression is like painting: it is best applied in several layers rather than one, thick coat. I find that a little analog compression during tracking, then some more individual track compression and maybe even a parallel compression bus sound much better for kick than waiting until mix to just twack the crap out of that one track.  Analog compression also helps you present a more finished, “prepared” sound to the analog-to-digital converter, much like they did back in the days of analog tape. You don’t need much, and you certainly don’t want to overdo it, but learning how to “print” kick to the converter with some analog compression is worth the effort. And in my opinion, you just have to keep doing it over and over, listening to your results and refining your technique over time; there is no magic compressor setting here.  In fact, if you make 3 subtle applications of compression on the kick and each time use a different kind with different settings, the better it will probably sound.

 

You may also want to apply some analog EQ for the same reasons you compress in the analog. It is VERY common to scoop out the kick in the 200 – 300 Hz range as noted by @quiztones and others. Of course if your mic includes a scoop in this range (the D6 does), that’s a pretty effortless way to go. I generally prefer to make my EQ cuts BEFORE compression and EQ boosts AFTER compression, so cutting a little between 200 - 300Hz using analog EQ in front of analog compression works quite well.  If the beater isn’t cutting through enough during tracking you can try experimenting with an analog presence boost in the 7k – 10k Hz range.   But remember that you can do more EQ boosts later, so don’t go crazy with it. In fact, if you have to go more than a few dB to get the beater punch you need, chances are you need to choose another mic and/or adjust your mic placement.

 

Setting level

Meters lie. There, I wrote it. When it comes to fast transients like kick drum, meters can be especially inaccurate. I have seen DAW meters display a different peak value for a recorded drum hit on several plays of the exact same thing. So when you’re setting your record level for kick, leave yourself some headroom.  We know that the short duration, low frequency information that is a kick drum makes it difficult to hear, so the temptation is to turn it up.  But this temptation makes it likely to record too hot. Don’t do it. Keep your levels down. This helps you in several ways.

 

First, it should help you avoid clip distortion, which is pretty easy to hear and almost impossible to do anything about once you’ve managed to record it.

 

Second, and far less obvious, low cost AD converters don’t tend to have the most robust analog circuitry. So your meter looks fine, you don’t hear any obvious distortion, but your kick track loses some edge and punch because it’s operating in a less than linear part of the analog circuitry.  Of course some analog signal shaping (compression and EQ) can help you set a level by keeping the peaks more similar from hit to hit.

 

You can always turn up the kick drum in the mix, but you can’t remove clipping or restore life to a kick track once it has been sampled. So set a modest record level. The more times you record kick, the better you will get at managing the input level.

 

Mixing Kick >

 

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Randy Coppinger - who I am and other stuff I'm doing.

 


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