All stereo miking techniques have their place in recording and live performances, but knowing which to choose can have a significant impact on the sound and depth of your drums and tracks. To make engineer’s lives easier and stereo assembly faster we’ve created stereo bars like the SMP17 and SMS Bar to make mounting mics in this phase-sensitive technique easier and more accurate. My feeling it that they’re not listening. You just need a piece of string, you tape it to the drum, find a good place for the first mic then pinch that point and swing the string around with both lines tight. So many people don’t do this and as a result the snare is off to one side in the overheads. There they are covering the cymbals without attention to image. Assuming you want the kick and snare in the centre of your mix then the centre line of a drum kit runs through them. Many recordings that used spaced pair overheads have an exaggerated stereo image. Like so many things it depends, but if you are trying to create the impression of listening to a drum kit then a suitable stereo array at head height some distance in front of the kit would be the “correct’ way to do it. There’s the Blumlein pair (or X/Y); spaced pair (or A/B); ORTF; mid-side (or M/S) and dozens of other methods. Live Overhead Drum Set-up. Friend of the blog Mike Exeter agreed: “I agree about the live thing - that is a good observation. Due to the lack of height in my room, I decided to pull the mics back a bit in line with the drum throne to give an almost “Drummers Ear View” of the kit. “Centre line definitely Kick and Snare. Many young engineers, and some old engineers too, think that stereo miking of a set starts with mics left and right over the cymbal positions. I think people see and copy.”. Which method should be used? Good luck!”, So one suggestion is that people are doing this because it looks right. Notice that the sound captured between the two channels overlaps in the center which is what provides the common center image. If the mics are angled then cardioid mics will of course contribute level differences. So where does this spaced cardioids facing inwards thing come from? In this article, we’ve only scratched the surface of the many methods and options available for stereo recording. In the diagram below, an R88 stereo mic is positioned above a drum set in Blumlein configuration. To understand how it makes a difference here’s the maths: When there is no time difference between the loudspeaker signals, then a level difference of 15dB between the right (+15dB) and the left (0dB) will move the phantom image all the way to the right. In this case using cardioids for overheads is potentially beneficial, allowing you to mitigate to some extent the influence of the low ceiling you’re probably recording under - a high ceiling is the single best thing you can do for your drum recordings after getting the right player and drums, with mics and preamps coming a long way down the list compared to having a high ceiling. In the following video, you can hear this same setup of a pair of N8s positioned above a drum set in spaced configuration. Anything within the area of pickup will sound like it is coming from where it is physically positioned. Width in particular is exaggerated, to the point where this isn’t wrong, any more than recording a grand piano from the perspective of someone with ears three feet apart with their head under the lid is “wrong”. Overheads are the Beginning of Great Drum Tracks. In the diagram below, a pair of spaced N8s sit above a drum kit. This isn’t necessarily wrong, the mics are being used for a different purpose and in a very different environment. Blumlein also works to capture the sound of cymbals off-axis, which can smooth out their sound, especially when recording a cymbal basher. The opposite can be done as well with a pair of mics in Blumlein above the kit and a pair of mics spaced out in front of the drummer. Both microphones can be used interchangeably depending on the stereo perspective you are trying to capture. What are your thoughts on XY vs Space Pair for drum overheads? I would guess you may be looking for SDC for an overhead pair rather than LDC. Alternatively there is that Recordman method found somewhere on the web which I would not call a spaced pair. The difference is more in the sound you want for each scenario. In a smaller spaces, my preference is to use cardiods in XY over the snare, correctly oriented for the kick/snare centre line. The N8s can also be positioned in ORTF above a drum set as well as in Glyn John’s famous drum configuration. If the idea of a pair of overheads is to capture a stereo picture of the whole kit, rather than be cymbal mics, then exactly what is this arrangement trying to achieve and where does it come from?
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