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how many mics do you need to record each instrument in a band?


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I don't know a lot about recording and the micing process is what i wanna find out. i guess vocals just needs one or two mics. guitar and bass also needs one mic each or two. but what about the drums? how many mics do you need to record drums.a

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You can run the bass direct and not have to deal with a mic. Many bass heads have line outs for just this purpose or you can use any number of DI boxes.

 

Drums can be done with as little as 2 mics for a stereo fill but most use a minimum of 4. A snare, a kick, and two overheads that pick up just about everything else. The snare mic can be positioned between the snare and High Hats to pick up both if you want.

 

I use 8 mics myself. I have a studio set set up so I'm not worried about moving the set and moving mics constantly. I currently have them set up with 2 Overheads, Snare, Kick, Two front toms into one mic, Floor tom and Ride/side toms. I use the last of the 8 for a sub kick mic, which is essentially a speaker converted into a microphone to pick up low kick drum frequencies.

 

I do run 16 channels which allows me to record an additional 8 tracks for the rest of the band. I run pairs of guitar cabs and use a mic on each one. This gives the guitars two different tones which can be very useful mixing, For example If I have one cab driven and one clean, I can pan from a clean tone to a driven tone instead of having a jump like when you step on a stomp box. You just pan one guitar up as you pan the other down and you get a seamless change in drive.

 

For vocals, I tap three channels off the PA mixers insert so the mic is preamplified but not EQed by the mixer. This gives me the full frequency response of the mic with no coloring from the PA. I can then color it all I want mixing in the box.

 

I nearly always run bass direct off the amps line out. This way I can get the best fidelity without all the boom from a mic and cab. Recording bass is a tricky item especially if you have a smaller studio.

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I don't know a lot about recording and the micing process is what i wanna find out. i guess vocals just needs one or two mics. guitar and bass also needs one mic each or two. but what about the drums? how many mics do you need to record drums.a

 

Here's a link to an article I did on drum kit miking...

 

http://www.harmonycentral.com/articles/drum-miking

 

In it, I start with a single mic, and move up from there to options requiring progressively more microphones.

 

I've heard good sounding single mic drum recordings, but typically I think you're better off with at least a four mic setup, with a pair of well placed overheads supplemented by kick and snare mics.

 

Don't forget - depending on how you track, you may not need as many microphones as you think. If you overdub one instrument at a time you can re-use the same mics for the next instrument. If you have a limited number of channels on your audio interface or if you only have a few mics, taking this approach might be your only option, but if you do have a interface with a lot of channels I'd suggest trying to track the rhythm section together as a unit instead of individually. I think you usually get more musical interaction and cohesion when you do. In order to do that, you'd need eight to sixteen inputs or more on your interface, depending on the group and how much of it you wanted to track simultaneously.

 

Typically I'll run about 8-12 microphones on a five-piece drum kit, with two on kick, one snare, a hi hat mic, a pair on overheads, one on each tom... and a room mic or two. Drums are usually going to use more microphones than just about anything else, but you can get very good results with only three or four microphones... but the drummer has to be up to the task, and ideally you'll also need a good sounding kit and acoustical environment to pull it off.

 

Guitar amps for basic rhythm section tracking might only have one mic per amp, but for overdubs and solos, I might have two or three mikes set up, and occasionally four.

 

Bass I always take direct. I will mic the amp too if it's do-able and not too noisy. Bass amps can bleed quite a bit, so be aware of that when setting everything up.

 

I also usually run keyboards direct unless I'm miking up a suitcase Rhodes or a Leslie speaker. If you like what you hear coming out of one, don't be afraid to experiment with miking up a keyboard amp, but be aware that they often have separate low and high frequency drivers, so you may need to use more than one mic.

 

Vocalists will need the most isolation if you plan on trying to track them along with the band. One microphone is usually all I use for solo vocalists. I normally recommend tracking a vocalist doing a scratch part along with the rest of the rhythm section if you can, but you need to isolate them, otherwise they will bleed into the instrument mikes.

 

I nearly always overdub harmony and background vocals, and the only way I'd track them with everything else is if it was a live album; in which case I'd want one mic per singer... unless it's a choir. For that, I'd want a good stereo pair, and a dedicated mic for any featured soloist(s), and if it's a large choir, spot mics in each section - altos, tenors, etc.

 

 

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This is why electric drums is a convenient option i think. you can plug it straight into the recorder with no mics involved. but still acoustic drums stil sound the best. i wonder when electric drums will sound as good as acoustic.

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This is why electric drums is a convenient option i think. you can plug it straight into the recorder with no mics involved. but still acoustic drums stil sound the best. i wonder when electric drums will sound as good as acoustic.

 

I've been asking myself that question since the late 70s. :lol:

 

Mesh heads and modern electronic kits are a lot better than they once were, and if you add something like the Zildjian Gen 16 cymbals, even the brass can be done fairly "right", although I still prefer using real drums whenever possible for many genres. Machine-generated drums are a lot more acceptable in some genres than others though.

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I have some drum machines and software like sessions drummer that have some great sounding drums. The Zoom units are miles ahead of some of the early rhythm clickers that created synthetic drum tones and cymbals.

 

Its actually very difficult to get real drums to match their quality unless you're replacing real drum hits with samples. The samples in drum machines or software/virtual machines are made from "Ideally" recorded mics, drums and acoustics. Its hard to match that just micing a set.

 

I spend more time on getting acoustic drums to sound good in a mix more then anything else. Of course I know better gear could help but I do have to use all of my experience to get good results. Other then the fact an actual drummer has human elements like dynamics and timing variations which adds to the musical composition, the actual tones have a hard time competing with allot of commercial stuff. Many drums parts you hear now are not the actual set. The transients are used to trigger samples. drum hits are replaced with samples which is why you hear so little of the human element in the music because there is practically no human dynamics or timing variations left. They've all been stripped away in the process of making it sound contemporary. .

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