How to Record Drums at Home

A drum kit is one instrument, not seven. Getting that backwards is the single biggest reason home drum recordings sound thin and clattery, because it leads people to build the sound from close microphones and then wonder why the whole thing has no glue. The overheads are the recording. The close microphones reinforce it.

Drums are also the one job on this site that genuinely changes what equipment you need. Every other guide here says two interface inputs is enough, and it is, right up until the moment you put a kit in front of a microphone and need four channels arriving at the same instant.

How many microphones do you actually need?

Fewer than the internet suggests. Each additional microphone adds a new arrival time for every drum on the kit, and every one of those arrivals interacts with all the others. Microphone count is not free.

Start at three or four. The Behringer BC1500 seven piece set at $199.00 is the cheapest way to get every position covered at once, and the honest note is that its overheads are the weakest part of it, which matters because the overheads are the recording. The Shure PG ALTA seven piece kit at $659.00 is the step up where the whole set is usable rather than the close microphones only.

Assembling your own is usually better value. A pair of matched small diaphragm condensers for overheads, a Shure BETA 52A at $219.00 in the kick and an SM57 on the snare is a professional four microphone kit that will still be in service in twenty years.

Where do the overheads go?

This is the part that decides everything, and it is a measurement rather than a judgement.

Whichever spacing you choose, both overheads must be exactly the same distance from the centre of the snare drum. Measure it with a length of cable, hold one end at the snare centre and bring the other to each capsule in turn. Do not eyeball it. A two inch mismatch puts the snare off centre in the stereo image and introduces a delay of about 0.15 ms between the two channels, which comb filters the snare when the pair is summed and hollows out exactly the part of the kit everything else is built around.

• Spaced pair. Two microphones roughly three feet apart, both about three to four feet above the kit, equidistant from the snare. The widest and most natural sounding option, and the standard starting point.
• XY coincident pair. Two cardioids at 90 degrees with their capsules almost touching, centred over the kit. Narrower, and perfectly mono compatible because there is no time difference at all. The safe choice when the mix has to survive a phone speaker.
• Recorderman. One microphone directly above the snare and one over the drummer's right shoulder, both exactly the same distance from both the snare centre and the kick beater. Two measurements instead of one, and it produces a remarkably solid centre with real width.
• Glyn Johns. One overhead above the snare and one to the drummer's right at floor tom height looking across the kit, again both measured to the snare. It weights the kit toward the toms and is the sound of a great many British records.

Height controls the balance between cymbals and drums. Higher captures more room and more kit, lower captures more cymbal and more attack. In a small untreated room, lower is usually the right answer because you want less of the room in the recording.

What is the 3 to 1 rule and why does it matter here?

The 3 to 1 rule states that when using multiple microphones, each should be at least three times as far from the other microphones as it is from its own source. It exists because of comb filtering.

When one sound arrives at two microphones at different times, summing them cancels some frequencies and reinforces others, in a repeating comb-shaped pattern. The severity depends on the level difference between the two arrivals. At a distance ratio of three to one, the inverse square law puts the second arrival roughly 10 dB down, and at 10 dB down the comb filtering is mild enough to ignore.

Read the last row carefully, because it is the one people trip on. Two overheads three feet from the kit should in principle be nine feet apart, which is impossible over a drum kit. This is why overheads are treated as a stereo pair and matched by measurement to the snare instead of being spaced under the 3 to 1 rule. The rule governs close microphones against each other, not a deliberately configured stereo pair.

Where does the kick microphone go?

Position inside the drum controls the balance between the beater click and the low end body, and the range of results across eight inches of movement is enormous.

• Just inside the port hole, aimed at the beater. Maximum click and attack, least body. The modern rock and metal position.
• Halfway inside, aimed at the beater. The balanced default, and where to start.
• Halfway inside, aimed off the beater toward the shell. More body and less click, which suits softer material.
• Just outside the port, a few inches back. Rounder and warmer, with the room starting to contribute. Good for jazz and for a kit with no front head hole.

A dedicated kick microphone like the BETA 52A is built for two things a general purpose microphone is not: an extremely high sound pressure handling capability, and a deliberately shaped response with a low frequency lift and a presence peak around 4 kHz. That shape is why a kick recorded with one needs so little EQ afterwards.

What interface do you need for drums?

Four inputs minimum, eight if you can. This is genuinely the only job in home recording where the answer to "how many inputs" is not two, and it is the reason the interface guide keeps naming drums as the exception.

The Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 at $299.00 is the smallest sensible drum interface: four preamps, four outputs and a separate headphone mix for the drummer. For eight channels the Behringer UMC1820 at $229.00 is the cheapest honest way to get there, and the Scarlett 18i20 at $749.00 is the version you keep.

All four or eight channels must be on the same interface and therefore on the same clock. Two separate two channel interfaces connected by aggregate device do not stay sample-locked, and the drift shows up as a slowly worsening phase relationship between your overheads across a take. The signal flow guide covers clocking and why it only becomes a decision once there is more than one digital device.

What does the room do to a drum kit?

More than to any other instrument, because a kit is loud, broadband and excites every mode in the room at once. Overheads and room microphones are largely recording the room, which is why the same kit and the same microphones sound entirely different in two spaces.

• Get the kit off the walls. At least three feet, and out of a corner, where the low frequency pressure maximum will thicken the kick into mush.
• Treat the corners before anything else. The kick fundamental sits right where room modes live, so the modes of your room are directly audible on the kick drum.
• Put something absorbent on the ceiling above the kit if the ceiling is low. A low ceiling reflection arrives within a few milliseconds of the overheads and puts a comb filter across the cymbals.
• Lower the overheads in a bad room. Less distance means less room in the ratio.

Work through how to treat a room for recording before you spend on microphones, because in a small untreated room the room is a larger factor than the difference between a $200 and a $700 microphone set.

How do you set up the session itself?

Drums are the one session where preparation genuinely determines the outcome, because you cannot fix any of it afterwards.

1. Tune the kit and change the heads. No microphone choice compensates for a dead batter head or a snare buzzing sympathetically with the floor tom. This is the largest single variable and it is free.
2. Set gain from the hardest hit in the loudest section, not from a warm up. Drums have the highest crest factor of anything you will record, so leave more headroom than feels necessary and aim for peaks around -10 dBFS.
3. Give the drummer proper isolation. A pair of closed back headphones is not optional next to a kit, and the click needs to be loud enough to hear over 110 dB of drums without leaking into the overheads.
4. Use stands that will not move. A close microphone that creeps during a take changes tone halfway through, and a drum kit vibrates the floor continuously. The stands roundup covers what holds position under a boom at full extension.
5. Record a slate take. Thirty seconds of the drummer playing the loudest thing in the song, before you commit. It is the only way to know your gain settings are right.

A tall counterweighted stand such as the K&M telescoping boom exists for exactly this job. Overheads ask for maximum height and maximum extension at the same time, which is the hardest thing you can ask a stand to do.

Related

• How to choose an audio interface: the input count question, answered
• Microphone polar patterns: how to aim a null at a cymbal you do not want
• Instrument frequency range chart: where each drum actually sits
• How to set recording levels: headroom for the highest crest factor source there is
• Best microphone stands and boom arms: the hardest stand job in a home studio
• The expert build: the tier where multi-microphone tracking becomes possible