Multiple Mic Setup For Recording Drums by Stevie Adamek

 [Stevie’s guest blog post on Drumming-Techniques, a website by Aaron Miller with expert drum tips, articles, and drum lessons.]

If your goal is to capture an authentic drum kit sound, there are certain steps that will get you there fast. You can mic drums in at least two ways: with multiple mics or with a single mic. This article covers using multiple mics.

A drum kit makes a lot of racket. The sympathetic tunings between the drums that are activated when you hit just one of them makes for a lot of noise, which you need to account for when recording. This is part of the unique energy that you capture when recording a real drum kit – as opposed to using electronic drums.

This is also why you want to mic each component of the kit separately, understanding that each track will have ambient artifacts from the other components (snare, cymbals, kick, etc.)

First, make sure you have fresh heads on each drum and you have properly tuned them. Now let’s talk about how to best mic each part of the kit… [Read more here]