How To Record and Mix Drums

Acoustic instruments are more difficult to record than electric instruments. The latter can be directly plugged into the mixer and/or recording device whereas the former will necessarily need microphones. The drums are particularly difficult because they naturally produce a big sound and since a typical set has several pieces like snare, kick, cymbals and toms, several microphones will be needed. Assuming you already have a good basic drum set - the heads are fairly new; the pieces are well-tuned; the screws, the pedals and other components are in good working order - the other factors you need to worry about are the recording equipment you'll be using, the room in which you'll be recording in and the placement of the microphones. The guidelines that will be discussed below apply to a budget home recording scenario.

1. Get the right recording equipment. A personal computer and a pre-amplifier/mixer are the core machines for a budget home recording. The PC should have a digital audio editing software installed and a powerful enough sound card, preferably one that's full duplex and with dedicated memory. Some high end sound cards have external input-output extensions to accommodate several sound sources at once. Despite this it might still be a good idea to use an intermediate pre-amplifier/mixer because this equipment is specifically designed to handle instrument audio signals. Some pre-amplifier/mixers are actually equipped with hard disks and are thus capable of directly recording and storing audio. You can go ahead with the recording with just this type of mixer. Their mixing functions however can be quite limited so you may still need the PC and audio editing software later on for in-depth mixing. Make sure you have at least four to six tracks or input channels available because you're going to need as many microphones to record the whole drum set. There are actually microphone kits for drum sets with each mic specifically designed to take in the sound of the drum piece it's made for. If such kits are above your budget, you could make do with professional multi-purpose directional instrument microphones. These microphones are good at capturing the sound source it's pointed at and can cut down background noise and non-source sounds - something you'll get a lot with a drum set. A good example of such a microphone is the Shure SM57 Instrument Microphone.
2. Prepare the room for recording. The ideal room for recording an acoustic instrument and particularly one as loud as the drums is one that is acoustically dead. This means that the sound doesn't bounce off the walls, floor and ceiling and create a lot of feedback and noise. That's why the recording rooms in professional studios are padded and have acoustic boards that diffuse the sound. Since you'll be doing this at home, you can improvise with curtains and rugs. If possible choose the biggest room in your house with a high ceiling to accommodate the volume of sound a drum set can generate.
3. Place the microphones in the right position. You could be doing a lot of trial and error at this point. Slight variations in mic placements produce different sounds. The right position ultimately depends on the quality of sound you're trying to achieve. It's important that you sound test every mic position for every piece of the drum set until you get something you're satisfied with.

   The one thing you should also be concerned about is bleeding. This occurs when the sound of one piece of the drum set is captured in the mic that's assigned for another piece. It's nearly impossible to completely eradicate bleeding when recording the drums but good positioning can significantly reduce it. You want to isolate the sound of each piece of the drum set as much as possible so that you can mix each sound better.

   Position the kick drum mic slightly inside the hole of the kick drum's front head. Inserting the mic further will get you a punchier sound and moving it away will get you more low resonance. You can experiment with placing it exactly perpendicular to the front head or slightly askew.

   The snare mic should be pointed down at a 30 degree angle towards the center of the snare. As much as possible, it should be pointed away from the hi-hat to avoid bleeding from that source. Position it close (about an inch and a half) to the snare's head near the rim with the stand placed somewhere between the hi-hat and toms.

   The microphones for the rack toms and floor toms should also be pointed down at a 30 degree angle towards the center of the particular tom's head. You should also position these mics close to the head and near the rim.

   For the crash, ride and hi-hat cymbals an overhead mic would usually do. You could try experimenting with dedicating one microphone for the hi-hat but usually one overhead microphone positioned perfectly will do. Try setting this overhead mic in various heights until you get the desired sound. Generally it's better to position it halfway between the crasher (which is usually at the left of the set) and the ride (which is usually at the right).

4. Mix the drums. Mixing the drums basically involves setting the sound level of each drum piece in such a way that the resulting overall sound is exactly the way you want it. This is a highly subjective activity as the kind of settings you'll apply will depend on what drum sound you want to achieve. The control factors that affect sound level are the track's output volume, noise gates, and compression. When you apply noise gates and compression, a certain threshold frequency is set which the tracks varying sound volume will not go past. These controls can help reduce ambient sound and make each track (each drum piece) sound more evenly (or unevenly depending on what you're going for). The volume slider on each track will control how much sound is outputted for each track and this is set after noise gate and compression levels have been determined.

   Another important factor in mixing is pan control. Stereo audio has two channels: left and right. Pan controls how much of the track's sound is more audible in the left or the right channel. Judiciously setting the pan for each track can give your drum recording a more realistic and dynamic sound. When mixing with audio editing software, these controls are accessible in the application's graphical user interface.

   There's a concept in recording called GIGO which stands for Garbage-In Garbage-Out. This simply means that the instrument should already sound good and the recording equipment should work perfectly to get the best possible sound. Mixing should serve only for minor adjustments and enhancements. No amount of software plug-ins and mixing techniques are going to correct a badly recorded sound or a poor recording performance for that matter.