Setting up the drums

I entered the studio this night in order to set up the drum mics and test the sound of the kit.  The first thing I did was to tune the toms and snare really well. I had in mind that I would also test my Ludwig Black Beauty as the snare for the album, but in the end I decided to use the Genista snare that I got with the kit I'm using, as it sounded really good and was in a good balance with the rest of the kit. For this album, I will use my Premier Genista 75th anniversary kit that has a 20" bass drum and 12" and 15" toms (the 10" tom is not mounted). The snare is 14" x 5,5", so nothig special there.

I have had problems before with losing the tuning of the drums during the recording sessions. This has been especially problematic with the snare drum as I tend to hit the rim shots pretty hard, so this time I decided to try Turerfish lug locks for all the drums. In theory, they should prevent the lugs from turning at all while mounted. Let's see how they work out. 

As soon as the kit sounded as good acoustically as possible, I started miking the kit. I had several options to choose from for the recording, but in order to keep things simple I decided to go with a Zoom H6 recorder that can record four mics in addition to the stereo condenser pair that comes with the recorder. Instead of placing the stereo pair over the head of the drummer, I will use the pair in front of the kit. In my opinion, I get more natural image of the whole kit this way, especially as I have no additional room or ambience mic. The stereo pair in front captures the body of the drums nicely, and in my opinion the cymbals sound really natural, too. The drawback is that the stereo image won't be very wide, and if the room sucks, it will affect the quality of the recording more than with traditional overheads. I tested a few positions for the stereo pair, and ended up placing the mic relatively close to the kit in order to minimise the room ambience. In addition, I placed some screens, usually used to form office cubicles, around the mics in order to reduce the room reflections.

For the snare top, I used my old and trustworthy Sennheiser E906. For the bass drum, I used Beyerdynamic Opus 99 and found that it sounded best half way inside the bass drum. For the toms, I intended to use my brand new Beyerdynamic TGD57C mics, but it turned out that one of them was broken, so I ended up using my friend's small cardioid Shure condensers that were lying around in the studio.

After placing the mics, I did some test recordings. If I'm happy with the sound also tomorrow, I guess I'm then ready to sart the actual recording sessions.