Tech Tip #1: Budget Drum recording

WARNING! This is for people who like things a bit... "lofi"... yeah, i Said it!

Anyway:

People bang on (Boom boom) about recording drums, and there are of course hundreds of ways of going about the task.
Over the years I've not acquired much recording gear as such, when I do buy a new microphone it's usually to replace one I've just broken.
As such, it can feel pretty limiting to what can be achieved and recorded. I find drums difficult to record for reasons like not having the space or not wanting to annoy the neighbors. Having got around these issues (just book a room in a community centre or something), another pops up; Microphones. The thing is, I only have 4 microphones, 2 condensor and 2 dynamic.

Heres a technique I use that seems to work pretty well. It involves the 4 microphones, positioning them to get a nice image of the drums and retaining some (some..) control over the sound in mixing.

There is a name for this technique, I think, but I cant remember it now.... no... no it's gone, I think the Beatles used it. Some people like the idea of putting a microphone on each and every drum to get complete control over the sound. Unless you know what you're doing, I think it's a bad idea. At the end of the day you're going to need to reassemble all those drums tracks you separated to make it sound like a whole kit again.

So with this technique, all you do to start is put a dynamic mic on the snare and one on the kick. Just move them around to find the sound you want (technical, I know). For the rest of the kit, put one mic directly above the snare at about 2 drum stick lengths distance. The last mic then points across the toms horizontally to the snare at the same distance (see diagram)
That's about it, just pan the two distance mics left and right, and use the kick and snare mics to bring those out, add eq, compression and the like.

Like I say, this is a technique if you're short on gear, but I really like the sound you get. It's not the "best" sound, but what does that even mean? Sound quality after all shouldn't be a scale of how good a sound is, but rather the characteristics or personality of the sound. If you do have more microphones, then one or two to get some room ambience (if it's a good room) is a good addition, but too many and you'll probably get phasing and boring things like that.

Mike