recording drums

[frosty55]

Can anyone give me an idea how to record toms on a kit?
I have a reel to reel eight track and will be using four of the tracks for drums:Track 1 kick, track 2 snare, track 3 cymbals, track four toms.
Drummer uses four toms on the kit. Whats the best way to record them onto the single track of the reel to reel?
I have gates and compressors of average quality to use on them and want to know should i gate and compress each tom while recording?
Also, whats the ideal microphone for the floor toms, a Sennheiser 421?
Any advice apprreciated thanks.

[ERB]

I have used 4 mics onto 4 tracks in the past with great results. I placed a Sure Beta 52 on the kick (track 1 center pan) Placed a sure 57 under the hihat spraying towards the snare (track 2 far right pan) *raise your hihat if too cramped* Then placed a 57 on the floor tom spraying towards the snare (track 3 far left pan) Then a tall boom stand with a 57 spraying the entire top cluster of toms (track 4 center pan)
I used the Sure Drum Microphone Kit for this drum track and understand 57's are well known for bleed, but the room sounded great (tall ceilings, sound foam in correct areas) and the drums were tuned well and our drummer was hitting great that day. I imagine you could use any combination of mics with this configuation, so use what you have and experiment.

I have used several more complicated methods with better mics etc... but this method set up quick, so our drummer was stoked to lay down his track. And it sounds incredible!!!

Good luck,
ERB

[Gibsonman63]

Ideally, you would want to use an 8 bus board with enough channels to mic every drum individually. Use the channel inserts on your board for the gates and compressor. Then set the threshold for each gate to close unless the drum associated with that channel is being played. Don't go too heavy on compression, just enough to control the loudest peaks. Tape is much more forgiving than digital format and acutally sounds better a lot of times when you overdrive a little. Use the compressor to keep it from turning to mush when you overdrive. Use the minimal compresson that you can get away with. When you master it down to stereo, you can add more compression, gated reverb on the snare, a little light flanging on the cymbals and any other effects to your hearts content and have plenty of time to experiment. If you commit it to tape, you are stuck with it.

For the floor toms, just use a good kick drum mic. We have been using an AKG D12.

FWIW, four tracks is going to be very limiting when you start mixing down because you will not be able to mix to stereo very effectively. For examply, with this setup, all of your toms will be on the same track, so you can't get the stereo effect of the drummer rolling through the toms and then hearing them start on the left and work around to the right. Same problem with cymbals. I like to mix with the high-hat panned left and the ride on the right. Generally, I will pan the drums the way they would sound if you were sitting behind the kit playing them.

If you are going to use just four channels, I would do kick, snare, overhead left and overhead right. Positioning the two overheads will be very tricky. You want to get a good balance between the cymbals and the toms on each mic and the phasing will be difficult. If you can put the drummer in an isolated room and have someone else moving the mics around for you while the drummer plays, it will make your life easier. Otherwise, you will have a lot of trial and error. With this setup, you only need to gate the kick and snare. Set the threshold for the overheads pretty low. Just enough to kill any ambient noise.

The guys at the recordingreview forum have a lot of good info on recording. You may want to check them out as well.