pictures of matchstick men by status quo covered by phantasm777 & vaisvil

[64Guitars]

Great song!

I mic my drums so that the listener can imagine he is behind them playing!

I heard an interesting tip for mic'ing drums from Richard Hilton in a video at SonicState.com. He's a recording engineer as well as the keyboard player with Nile Rodgers and Chic. He has also worked with Bowie, Clapton, Dylan, and many others (see http://www.hiltonius.com/index.html).

Anyway, he says that he and many other engineers like to use a stereo mic about three feet above the drummer's head, pointing at his ears so that it picks up what the drummer hears. They use this to capture the overall sound, but also mic the kick drum, snare, etc. separately to give them more control when mixing and to make it "larger than life". The idea is that the drummer is playing based on what he hears while sitting at the kit, so it makes sense to try to pick up the sound that he hears rather than just pointing the mics directly at the drums. Check out the video if you're interested. He explains it much better than I can. I found it quite interesting.

http://youtu.be/VFdvzM5aCEU

Most of the drum discussion starts at around the 1 hour point, but there's more mic discussion before that too.

[phantasm777]

about ready to go to sleep, watched hockey, chi. blackhawks win first game of the Stanley cup finals 4 - 3 in triple over time! wow!

I use 8 mics:

on the left is one mic for my 8 and 10in toms

in the middle is for my 12 and 13 in toms

another middle one for the bass drum

another middle one, but just slightly to the left is my hi hats and snare.

off to the right cover my 14, 15 and 16 inch toms

on a mic stand above on left it covers 2 cymbals and cowbell and probably some of the left toms a bit

hanging from the ceiling is  a mic covering 3 cymbals and prob some of my mid toms

hanging from the celing is another mic on the right covering another 3 cymbals and prob some of the 3 right toms.

so far this set up works great, it took forever though getting levels right since they have to be done on the mixer, as I cannot record each mic individually, but all at once as one track. but the separation is there so that's what I was striving for.

so when I go across all my left to mid to right toms for a fill, you can hear it panning from left to right as well as the cymbals etc.

maybe someone records their drums like this I do not know, but it is what I like and I think I finally got it! it took a hell of a long time to get the right levels.

I use audacity to do this live, and I have the rec levels barely over one and it clips, but I envelope it down when I put it with the songs with the other instrument tracks.

at last I think I am finally done fiddling with the vol. levels for the mics for my drums ( some of my mics are cheapies), so one day i'll get better ones. drums can be a very expensive hobby, between buying sticks, skins, cymbals regularly cause they all wear out, gets very very costly, sometimes I just have to use cracked cymbals till they really sound bad.

but at least this kit is close the size I always wanted, not entirely but better than just 4 to 5 drums, yeeech! just not for me!