As an amateur recording engineer, you’ll likely run into the name Recorderman when learning how to mic a drum kit. Recorderman’s approach to placing overhead drum microphones is recommended for beginners because it’s easy to set up, and yields good, sometimes great, results in practically every situation.
The name “Recorderman” comes from a user on the recording.org forums who is credited with popularizing the technique. (Though his approach has been used by engineers for decades. It’s largely a two-mic adaptation of Glyn Johns’ mic setup.)
Here’s Recorderman’s original post about his technique, along with some good followup discussion. And this Gearslutz thread on overhead drum mic placement has more discussion and pictures.
Recorderman in a nutshell: Use two drum sticks as a ruler to place your mics the same distance from the snare drum, and a cable or string to get them equidistant from the kick beater. Here’s the best video description I’ve seen, to better illustrate:
Recorderman’s approach accomplishes 3 things:
- It places the snare and kick drums in the center of the stereo image.
- It ensures any close mics on the kick and snare are in phase with the overheads.
- It captures a balanced drum kit sound, close to what the drummer hears.
This microphone setup is ideal in a few situations:
When you have limited microphones for the drums: Especially when you only have 2 or 3 mics, Recorderman can still get you an open, balanced stereo image of the drum kit. If you’re recording a talented drummer, 2 or 3 microphones in this arrangement might be all you need.
Recording with low ceilings or in a tight space: Drums sound best in a big, open room. Traditional overhead miking approaches tend to capture a “smeared” drum sound when used in small rooms, largely because sound reflections off the ceiling interfere with the direct sound from the drums. Recorderman’s technique gets the microphones close enough to the drums that this isn’t an issue.
When the drums sound killer at the drummer’s position: With decent microphones, this setup usually captures a sound close what the drummer hears. If the drums sound ideal right where the drummer is sitting, you should consider a Recorderman setup even if you’re in a high-ceilinged space.
(Note: I use a modified version of Recorderman for The Morning Rain drum tracks. There are a few pictures, and sound samples here.)
Previously: Better drum mixes with a drum reference track, Parallel compression for fatter drum tones
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I like it alot. I am using the same techniques for measuring distance between mics and snare / kick, but I’m using “underheads” since my recording space for drums is a tiny room, where the paper walls keep nothing from my neighbors’ ears.
You’re my hero. I just tried this, and it sounds amazing. I’d never tried it before because it sounded too weird.
Awesome. I’m glad it’s working for you guys.
Which mics did you use, Josh?
I used my pair of AKG C414s. Here’s the back and forth of old vs. new (starting with Recorderman):
http://www.joshwoodward.com/tmp/Recorderman.mp3
Wow Josh, the difference is hard to believe! Was the “old” setup a standard XY stereo arrangement?
The old setup was my usual spaced stereo setup, a couple feet on top. They were recorded in two sessions, months apart, but the “before” was a release candidate for the CD I’m working on.
I’m completely converted now.
basically i know nothing about this stuff but i need to do a recording of a jazz band in three weeks for my A Level project. this idea looks really good. do you have any ideas for a trumpets, pianos, guitars and bass’.
this is really sweet! i’m glad i stumbled upon this… now i’ve got to dig around and see if there’s more stuff like this. and he’s in SF too. rock!
tait
Thank you so much Recorderman.
I am hooked!
Hey, thanks for this. I have recorded my band’s debut CD using my PC and 2 Audio-Technica AT2020 mic’s and 2 Behringer MIC100 preamps. First recorded drums two-track using the R/M-technique with the bassplayer and myself miming (there are some hilarious vid’s of this) in our rehearselroom. So it’s the straight stereo drumsound, without extra overdubs.
We did the guitars/bass/vocals using the same AT2020’s. Results are at:
http://www.totallyunsigned.co.uk/weissmuller
I guess making this CD cost us no more than $300
Hey Leo, great production and great music. Amazing what you can do with such limited equipment!
Thanks for you comment!
Wow Leo, sounds very good. And the songs are beautiful!
Hey- I’m gunna be trying this out pretty soon, and I was wondering- what do you recommend doing on the other side of the mics? I’ll be recording/mixing into a pc, haven’t decided what program yet. Should I just send the mics into a dual mono-to-stereo cable and adjust the panning in the mix? This seems like it would work, but what if i ever wanted to add more mics to the setup? Thanks a lot for any help.
> what do you recommend doing on the other side of the mics?
I’m not certain what you mean by “other side.”
This setup is great because, since the mics are closer to the kit than with traditional overheads, you don’t need to worry so much about dampening the ceiling reflections. (Though if you do so, the sound will be that much tighter.)
> Should I just send the mics into a dual mono-to-stereo cable and adjust the panning in the mix?
Ya, you can record them to a single stereo track. Or two separate tracks, and pan them hard left and hard right.
Depending on the mix, you may not want a wide stereo image of the drum kit, in which case it’s easier to use two separate tracks, and pan each appropriately.
> but what if i ever wanted to add more mics to the setup?
The 2 mics in this setup will be your overheads, so you can add additional mics just as you would in other drum-miking arrangements. Generally, you’d add them in this order, depending on the number of extra mics you have:
kick drum
snare top
room mic(s)
hi hat and/or ride cymbal
individual toms
(Though of course it also depends on what the song requires. Sometimes, for example, the ride cymbal or hi-hat drive the rhythm, in which case it can work better to forego the snare and room mics and focus instead on capturing the cymbal detail.)
I’ve done the entire recording using Adobe Audition 2.0 and mostly used the effects-plugins that come with the program. Used a couple of freeware VST plugins as well. Can’t exactly remember what went where. Just go with what you think sounds good and don’t be afraid to try some ‘crazy’-stuff. You can easily undo stuff you don’t like.
Nice. I’ve been recording for years and I have never heard a successful example of this technique. But those guys never had the details you provided either. I’ll be applying this every chance I get. Nice job making something that could be confusing, simple.
I generally default to XY overheads with AKG c1000s. Its always been good, but this seems better.
I’m just wondering about what about #2 “It ensures any close mics on the kick and snare are in phase with the overheads.”
In order for that to work would a kick mic need to be on the beater side? I’ve been using a front kick mic about a foot in front of the drum and I need to flip the phase and digitally line up kick mic with the overheads. Once I do this I get a great drum sound but a part of me wonders if it could be done another way.
Sincerely,
Todd
Todd –
You really need to either simply position, listen, position, listen and so on until you get the sound you’re looking for – or even get one of those fancy phase tools to simulate the same thing – or align things digitally.
The #2 is a misquote:
2. Place the overheads in a position which is in-phase with the kick,snare and overheads.
is the actual quote.
Phase is unavoidable. The point of recorderman (and glyn johns) setups is to control the phase so that the overheads are not diminishing your sound by having OHs that are equidistant to both the BD and SD. You could do the same technique to, say, your tom. So now the tom would be amazingly in phase with other things diminished a bit because they’re out of phase.
The reason this technique is preferred is that the snare and bass drum end up being the least “positional” in your mixes. You center those, the other instruments’ phase is then natural and real sounding because they play off of each other’s relative positions around the kit. The small tom will be louder on the left mic than the right mic, and a bit less coherent phasewise than the snare. Sounds about right!
You could, for instance, ignore the rule here that sets the OH volumes equal and position the mics wherever you’d like, and balance the snare drum and bass drum using volume level. But that’s the point — doing that takes hours and hours of trial and error and you can see the obvious issue of bias and volume randomness depending on the song, the dynamics of the drummer and reflections in the room. With the equidistant methods, it mathematically corrects everything.
The mic on the front of the bass drum will not necessarily be out of phase with the overheads. You do need to position the microphone (and adjust phase settings at your disposal) to bring out the bass drum.
One thing to remember is that flipping a phase switch is a 180 degree shift. It works great if you were perfectly out of phase… but, what if you were 97 degrees out of phase? Now you’ve merely shifted to 83, not much of a difference.
So whichever method you use, you still need to do phase checking to either get the MOST diminished signal you can at the proximity you want and then flip that 180 switch, or look for that fat signal.
Another thing to remember is that recorderman’s specific quick setup biases a few ways: Your hihats are going to be hot, as well as any other cymbals that are near the snare. They’re simply much closer to that mic than the ride/crashes that would be near the low toms.
This is where the aiming of the capsule comes in to play. You can keep the snare / BD centered but aim the capsule at different things to change the bias. If you’re in a small room or are recording someone who bashes cymbals (or someone that has live/rock cymbals and not recording/light cymbals) you do *not* want the mics aimed at the snare center. The reflections of the hats onto the snare will mess up your stereo imaging bigtime (they’ll phase). People, even recorderman himself in that thread, have gotten good success out of pointing the mics where the beater hits the bass drum or at the toms: of course, this makes the snare way less punchy — but that’s why you have the snare top mic.
Just started using the Recorderman technique.
Any tips on eq’ing and compression, on the stereo drum mix, from anyone out there.
I’ve been playing around with the Recorderman setup, and have been pleasantly surprised at the results. I’ve always close-miked the drums, and used the overheads mainly as cymbal mics, but I was never really satisfied with my results. I’m finding that the Recorderman setup gives me a much better snare sound than I’ve ever gotten with close-miking.
The only tweak that I made was distancing the mics to about 40″ from the center of the snare instead of two drumstick lengths, because the length of two of my sticks is only 32″, which put the right-shoulder mic in the path of one of my crash cymbals.
I also had to change my bass drum beater from the hard plastic side to the felt side, because the mic over my right shoulder was picking up a “clicking” sound from the impact of the beater on the bass drum head. After doing that, everything sounds great. I’m looking forward to recording some new stuff with my band using this technique.
Thanks for the great tutorial. Recording vocals and the other instruments hasn’t posed a problem for us, since we use the best vocal mics. Unfortunately, we ran into issues when it came time to record our drummer. We’ll try this setup and see how it goes!
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