5 Tips For Awesome Drums In Your Home Studio

Recording drums in your home studio can be one of the most complex and tricky instruments you will ever get to record.

​With so many drums that make up a complete kit and so many mics and mic choices it can be a bit overwhelming at first. But fear not! You can capture a great drum recording in your home studio if you follow these simple guidelines:

There is really is no substitute for starting with a great musician. There are infinite possibilities in how a drummer can hit the drums creating a variety of sounds and tones. And if the drummer has a great touch and tone when playing the kit it will make the whole drum kit sound better. When the drum kit sounds better your mics sound better, no matter what mic you choose.

And of course there are also an endless number of drum grooves to choose from too. You can take a group of drummers all playing the same exact groove, but each will have a different flavor and style to the way they play that groove. So choose someone that plays with great feel and makes it fun for you to play guitar and sing (if you are playing along).

Now of course some of us like to play drums ourselves, and that’s just fine. If you are a great drummer yourself then you’ve already got that covered and can get right down to recording. However if you are a wanna be drummer (like me) then you might really want to consider bringing in a ‘real’ drummer for the session. I don’t want to discourage you from playing drums if you really enjoy it. But if you decide to bring in someone really good then you may discover that the groove feels better, the fills are more solid, and the tones are far more consistent.

Drums are like guitars and need to be in tune to sound their best. When a drum is well tuned it can have a great tone and really sing. In fact the whole kit can sound better if you have chosen the best drum shells, heads, and cymbals as a group. No this doesn’t mean that you have to have an expensive or fancy kit. In fact I have a motley collection of drums in my studio that I have gathered over the years, but they are mostly drums that I really like the sound of when I first found them.

I have a collection of snares (around 6?) and they all sound a little different from each other. Some are student snares with only 6 lugs, some are wooden, and the others are metal. There are two snares that have consistently proven to be great choices for rock songs (or just about any song for that matter), The Ludwig Supraphonic, and the Ludwig Acrolite snare drums are both excellent affordable choices for an all around rock snare that can be tuned up or down depending on the song.

There are many ways you can mic a drum kit with one mic:

• Try placing a mic above the kit looking down so that it can see all the drums and cymbals.
• Try placing the mic near the drummer’s head so that it looks at the kit like the drummer does.
• Try placing the mic on the floor in front of the kit.
• Try placing the mic above the kick pointing toward the side of snare and top of the kick so that it can hear both the kick drum and the snare in a balanced way while picking up the rest of the kit at the same time.

Listen for the balance of the drums coming out of the speakers. If you need more of a particular drum simply move the mic closer and if you need less of something move it away. Once you feel like you understand what’s going on with the single mic then you can better understand what’s missing and start to add close mics on the drums to help bring out what the single mic lacks.

If you have a pair of mics you can try the Recorderman setup. Basically you take one mic above the drum kit pointing down at the rack tom and snare and measure the distance to the center of the snare drum and also the kick beater.

Then you take the second mic and place it near the drummer’s shoulder on the floor tom side (the image below is a right handed drummer). Measure the shoulder mic so that it is also the same distance away from the center of the snare and the kick beater.

Then you can pan both mics stereo all the way to the left and right and the snare and kick sound will stay in the center image since they both reach the two mics at the same time through the air.

If you want to take the Recorderman to the next level you can try what I’ve loosely been calling the “Lijman” technique where you add a third mic out in front of the kick, but measure it to be the same distance to the kick beater as the other two mics. That way you can get a little more impact, focus, and body out of the kick drum. And because it is the same distance from the beater as the other two mics the attack will stay focused right in the center image.

If you are lucky to have a great sounding room for the drums in your house then congrats, and go ahead and start recording! But if you are like most of us the room might sound a little funny. Perhaps the walls are all hard dry wall and the space sounds like an boxy empty office space. Or maybe you are in a basement with a lot of splashy sound coming back off the concrete walls.

Use careful mic placement to help alleviate the room problem too. You might rely on close mics a little more. Or bring your overhead mics down a little closer to the drums so that they hear the direct drums more, and reflections off the walls and ceiling less.

In fact you can even add a third overhead mic in the center to balance out the stereo image better. So one mic near the hihat, another near the ride, and a third one above the center of the kit with the hi hat and ride mics panned out to the sides in the mix.