How to Record Drums: The Best Equipment, Techniques, and Tips!
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How to Record Drums: The Best Equipment, Techniques, and Tips! · Source: Gearnews
How to Record Drums – Equipment, Techniques, and Tips! · Source: Audient
Learning how to record drums, especially acoustic drums, is still one of the most difficult challenges for many beginning producers and engineers. Check out our workshop!
How to Record Drums – The Guide
Why Not Just Use Plugins?
When you listen to the quality of VSTs like BFD, Addictive Drums, or Superior Drums, drum plugins have become incredibly realistic. These days, you can quickly fake analog recordings with a little piano roll work, subtle variations in timing and velocity, and a few analog emulations in the effects chain. So, why even bother learning how to record drums?
No matter how realistic a plugin sounds, more natural-sounding music often comes out when an actual human plays the instrument. Because translating a groove you have in your head into the piano roll using a mouse (or MIDI keyboard) is a detour that will often break your creative flow. Having a well-rehearsed (!) drummer sit-in at a session and being able to change the beat on the spot or throw in some fills isn’t something you can do with AI (yet).
It becomes especially tricky when you move away from rhythmically “simple” genres like pop or country into hard rock, heavy metal, or even jazz. Eventually, programming realistic MIDI grooves becomes such a hassle that it takes even longer than recording them. Plus, in these genres a more acoustic drum sound with complex rhythms is often an essential part of the sound. That’s why recording drums might not just be the more musical way to go, and it’s often faster, too.
Who Plays the Drums?
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let’s start with the groove and the drum sound. The person playing the drums is the most crucial part of this. They can make even the smallest toy drum kit produce funky grooves – or play stumbly, undynamic patterns on the most expensive kit.
If you don’t own a drum set, you might be able to borrow one or get one in your rehearsal room. Or the person playing the drums might bring their own drum kit. It’s also helpful to look into drum tuning. A drum set that’s out of tune, especially with worn heads, usually only works well enough for punk.
How to Record Drums – the Room
The recording room should also play a role. Because, after the musician and the drum set, nothing is as crucial for the sound when it comes to figuring out how to record drums. Now, not a lot of people have access to expensive studio spaces. But even your own rehearsal room or basement can be used for decent-sounding recordings with a few acoustic tweaks, such as mattresses, blankets, or rugs on the walls.
Often, beginners try to make the recording space as “dead” as possible, i.e. to dampen room reflections. Unless you’re recording 70s disco, you’re not necessarily doing yourself a favor with that. Allowing a little room reflection into the microphones, maybe leaving the stairwell door open for some epic reverb, can be just the thing to give your drum sound natural size.
Microphones
There are many different schools of thought here on how to record drums. From meticulously miking each shell from two sides, each cymbal and the room at several corners to setups with only 2–3 microphones, there are many nuances. As a general rule of thumb, mostly dynamic mics are used on the shells, such as the bass drum, snare and toms, and higher-resolution microphones such as large-diaphragm, small-diaphragm or ribbon microphones are used for the overheads and room mics.
A ribbon microphone like the Warm Audio WA-44 used as an overhead can provide exactly the vintage factor in the sound that you need for the recordings. And a small diaphragm condenser microphone like the WA-19N used as a room microphone or for recording hihats or other cymbals captures these high-frequency signals in such a way that they sit well in the mix later on.
As for the positioning of the microphones, take your time for an extensive soundcheck in the beginning to adjust and try out the sound that will end up in the DAW. This is one of the most important preparations when it comes to recording drums.
Audio Interface for Recording Drums
Hardly any other instrument requires as many inputs on an audio interface as a drum kit. Especially when the miking gets more detailed, the drum group can easily take up 6–10 inputs. And if you’re recording an entire band, things can quickly get tight with more compact interfaces.
With an interface like the ID48 from Audient, with a whopping 24 inputs, you’ll be set for many recording situations. Eight of the inputs are equipped with Class A preamps, which bring the legendary analog sound of Audient’s studio consoles, each with a whopping 68 dB of gain and switchable 48-volt phantom power. Note that for inputs 9-24, you will need an additional ADAT extension.
But the eight existing inputs alone are perfectly adequate for miking a drum kit. The interface also offers two headphone outputs with separate volume controls, as well as two high-Z inputs for connecting electric guitar and bass directly. If you record in a studio or have a lot of outboard gear like hardware compressors in your rehearsal room, you’ll also be pleased with the ADC function. The ADC input/output pair lets you connect up to eight studio devices like compressors or additional preamps into the recording path via a couple of D-sub breakout cables (available separately) – very handy!
Recording and Editing
Preparation is the be-all and end-all. The better the drummer knows the songs, the faster you can work. And the more options you have to try out different things or make quick changes. If there are particularly tricky parts, it can also make sense to punch these in separately, for example, fills or other transitions.
One of the most important topics for any recording situation is monitoring. In other words, the drummer will need to hear the other instruments of the song on his headphones, plus the drums, possibly (highly recommended!) a click track (metronome signal) – and preferably without latency! Before the drummer arrives, familiarize yourself thoroughly with the software of your audio interface, see how the routing works and how you can quickly adjust it.
And of course, a lot can be fixed out by post-processing, editing, quantizing and mixing. But the more you aim to achieve the best possible result during the recording process, the faster you will get to the finished song. Don’t fix it in the mix!
Conclusion
The most important thing you’re learning how to record drums: have fun! For both engineers and musicians, a recording session can be quite a stressful situation, depending on experience and temperament. So make sure you take breaks and don’t get too hung up on songs that just aren’t working out.
With microphones like the WA-19N from Warm Audio and an interface like the ID48 from Audient, you’ll definitely be equipped on the technical side to quickly achieve professional-sounding results when learning how to record drums.
More on How to Record Drums
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