Moonlapse said:
I saved this locally, thanks a lot! Been needing a guideline for drum mic'ing for a while.
I still have one question. With phase issues... if you abide by the 3:1 rule, will you be fine regardless of how out-of-phase some mics are with each other? If not, how do you know in which direction and how far to move the mics? Or is it just a trial and error thing? As you can tell I haven't had much experience mic'ing kits
The 3:1 rule doesn't necessarily apply in all situations.
The only phase problems I've ever run into micing a kit are with the close mics in relation to the overheads.
Like for example, if you have a mic 1" from a snare and it's out of phase with your overheads, try a polarity flip on the snare mic, or maybe raise or lower the overheads... or both.
I've never had, say, two close miced toms phasing eachother out. If you have two dynamics 1" away from each of their respective sources, you're probably pretty safe there as long as the mics are angled down at the toms, not facing slightly across the toms at eachother or something like that.
I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but I've had pretty good luck so far.
But... I do mostly rock stuff that's pretty heavy on room vibe and I like to get the "meat" of the snare from the overheads, so I use either ORTF or the Glyn Johns setup. Not too many phase problems with those arrangements, but they might not be suitable for metal, where you really need a lot of control over the different parts of the kit to keep things tight.
I'm pretty sure that Andy and James like to try to keep the snare "out" of their overheads as seen in these photos. The 3:1 rule would probably apply for the overheads in setups like these, but I don't want to try and speak for them!
