(Note to my VoIP readership: this is an indulgence since I don’t have anywhere to blog about my other passion, amateur recording. So bear with me. After all, this used to be a blog about music.)

I’ve been looking for a good way to record my drum kit, since my home recordings reek of pre-recorded drum loops that scream amateur. This is fine if you spend all day in Reason doing techno music, but not so fine if you like rock and roll. You just need real drums, at least I do, and I needed a good, cheap way of recording my standard setup, a four-piece drum set with ride, two crashes, and of course, hi hats.

So I experimented with a variety of potential setups before settling on something I’m happy with. Keep in mind, I’m using a Macbook without a digital input/preamp device, so I only have two inputs (left and right). The drums, which are recorded using four microphones, are mixed down to the two inputs using a cheapy six-channel mixer, again, with no preamps. Here is the result.
The mic I chose are also cheapies, but I was very pleased with the outcome. A Nady kick drum mic and two phantom-powered condensers. The condensers go overhead, each equidistant from the snare drum. My first couple of takes I tried with just these three mics, and it came out very crisp and clear once I had the levels set right on the mixer. The only problem was, the snare drum wasn’t present enough. I toyed around with moving the overheads closer to the snare, but it just wasn’t good enough. So I ended up close-micing the snare with a trashy 57-style vocal mic, and that gave me just enough volume to bring the snare up to right level of smack I was looking for. The only problem is that the quality of the snare sound suffered when I did this. The overheads were definitely more articulate than the clumsy old mic I put on the snare.

In the end, I came up with a recording that you can listen to by clicking here. Keep in mind, this isn’t a performance, just a quick drum session of several rock beats and rolls designed to evaluate the recording setup. The only post-processing I did was compress the final track a bit and add a hint of verb. There’s no EQ anywhere, not even from the input mixer. This should give a good idea of the frequency range and capability of this particular recording setup. BTW the single stereo track was recorded using GarageBand.
Generally, I’m pretty pleased with the result, considering the mics and cables only set me back less than $200. What do you think about it?