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Kick drum mic placement?


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I'm hoping to field some tips, tricks, or method behind the madness of somehow determining "likely best kick drum mic placement"... besides trial and error... and going with that's seemingly worked best in the past. An experience from last Friday's performance suggests I still have much to learn on this subject... much of which I suspect could be best served by accumulating a deep understanding and ability to tune drums and somehow developing the social chops as to be afforded the possibility to do so (if there's a serious reason to consider doing so) on somebody else's drums and all that goes with that... (sigh)

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Well if it was anyone else on this forum I might chime in with my thoughts but somehow I doubt you need help on this. You know the drill: drum tuning, decent mic, placed in 2-3 places usually gets good results. Of course the pa has to be up to par for the room.

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Gotta agree with Unalaska. But I have caught myself trying to make a kick drum (and other drums) sound like how I think it should sound rather than what it actually sounds like. That's me being lazy. And when I can't dig something sonically out of it that I think is missing, because it's not there, I take a few moments and go listen to the kit on the stage. Then I try to recreate that sound out front. Whether it sounds the way it does intentionally or because the drummer doesn't know how to tune his own drums is kind of irrelevant at that point, I've got a show to do and an impromptu drum clinic is usually not in the cards.

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My personal preference .....

 

First damp the bejesus out of the kick with damping material inside the drum to keep the ring down as much as possible. Ensure the kick is using a hard beater, not cloth.

 

Place the microphone inside the drum through the vent hole. Place the microphone 4" from the inside skin about 4" off to the side of the beater.

 

Be sure to gate the kick. I prefer a gate that has a filter on it so you can set the gate to the frequency of the kick so it isn't going off when the snare is hit. I like the attack pretty fast, but not so fast as to get clicking gates on cheaper gates.

 

Eq bump at ~2K to get the beater slap.

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A little background on kick drums. In the beginning (or pre 60's), bass drums were thin shelled and used thick heads (calf skin if you go far enough back). The problem was that on the road these shells got warped, lost their bearing edge and generally died an early death. With the materials technology and manufacturing techniques of the time, drum companies started making thick shelled drums (to hold up OTR) and started using thinner heads to get the resonance which was lost. Newer technology (since the 90s or so) has allowed excellent thin shells that live well, so the use of thicker heads are back in fashion.

 

I guess it depends (sorry I had to say that) on what type of drum you're micing and of course what kind of sound you want to get. FWIW, I've found that bigger drums are easier to tune than smaller ones. Unless you're willing to supply a different head (wow would this require some super diplomacy) you usually are stuck with a narrow range of choices when it comes to tuning (referring to kick drums). Placement, muffling & EQing are pretty much all you can do (unless the drum is WAY out of tune). A good drum will usually sound good and a bad one is nearly impossible to make right. At least that's my experience. I just put a new head on my kick drum (the square plastic/felt beater had turned 45 degrees and pounded a hole through it - another drummer was playing it at the time :-(. I just put the head on it and ballparked the tuning and it sounded great (because it's a good sounding drum).

 

There's lots of theories on tuning drums. I prefer to have the resonance head (bottom or front) a little higher than the beater head (it gives you that high to low decay sound (strangely you hear the bottom head first and then the top later (ms later))), but other methods are certainly valid. One hint is to grab a stick and put your finger lightly in the exact middle of the head (to dampen all of the over tones) and lightly thump a few inches inside each lug (distance from the rim is critical as well). By listening to the pitch, this will at least get you to a consistent tension all round the head (the finger in the middle helps a lot knowing whether it's the north or south - east or west.....lug which is too tight or loose. A few drum companies make odd numbers of lugs to minimize this effect (a great idea I think). Beyond that a given size drum will only tune well within a defined range. Basically you'll know when you got it right when the dissonant "beat" frequencies go away (it now sounds musical). Once that is done, muffle to get rid of peak resonances if they are too annoying.

 

I don't claim to be an expert but that's my method anyhow.

 

Hope it helps.

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You'll sooner get a pig to sing than a drummer to change anything. Basically you play the hand dealt to you, so I agree with the advice to listen carefully to the sound of the drum, and then work with what you hear. This makes things easier, not more difficult, IMHO.

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You'll sooner get a pig to sing than a drummer to change anything. Basically you play the hand dealt to you' date=' so I agree with the advice to listen carefully to the sound of the drum, and then work with what you hear. This makes things easier, not more difficult, IMHO.[/quote']

 

Per exactly. I think one would sooner get a guitarist to allow you to set his knobs than a drummer let you tune his drums or anything of the sort.

 

Hence: How to deal with the hand dealt?

 

Let's assume the worst of possible hands... or what's seemingly common rather than what's ideal (maybe they're one in the same).

 

Kind of like the PBS cooking shows vs. reality cooking. Sure, to do it right, start with a pound of really fresh jumbo shrimp, and a 1/4 pound of butter, a nice bunch of Shiitake mushrooms, some fresh picked shallots and some fresh black Italian summer truffles, heat a non-stick "Iron clad" skillet to medium heat on your commercial grade gas stove... sprinkle a little extra virgin olive oil on the shallots.... etc... Ok... so what's for dinner? Let's see... here's some ramen noodles, a can of pork & beans and a brick of cheese that's starting to mold... and some left-over hamburger patties in a Tupperware tomb... and the microwave is on the fritz... and I'm really tired and broke till payday.

 

So what is a common hand dealt concerning micing up drums?

 

Or maybe if one had really deep knowledge and an understanding of drum tuning and if that all knowing halo around your head was "self evident"... getting to the foundation of the matter would be possible. I remember a number of years ago I was playing in a band with a guitarist who had the worst of guitar sound. He was technically a pretty good player... although a recent graduate from a couch acoustic player to a electric guitarist performing on stage, playing a Les Paul Custom through a Fender Princeton (as I recall) but his guitar sound was awful. After a couple of gigs I confronted him about his guitar sound... he was super defensive... threw a total hissy fit... said "look, I'm playing on some of the best gear money can buy... so what do you mean that my guitar sounds awful?" And then he pulled out the owner's manual for the Princeton... which he had tucked in the back of the amp... and showed me right in owner's manual where it was recommended to set the knobs for his desired style of playing... and then he went to show me that he had all the knobs set just as the manual recommended... which he did... except (as I recall)... he was reading the chart/drawing upside down or something like that. "No, no, no... the volume knob is over here, not over there... see this knob is labeled "volume"... that one over there is labeled "intensity". So how about we go with the manual's suggestion and set the knobs as suggested and just see how it sounds, ok?" "sure.... OH!... WOW.... um... thanks... wow... that does sound a lot better. Now that you mention it, I was pretty frustrated with the sound, but I thought I was doing everything right."

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It kills me that manufacturers put recommended settings in their manuals. When did folks get so lazy and just stop listening?

 

Per everyone's comments... a good drum sound starts with good drums tuned properly. That said, micing someone else's kit is tricky (that social skills piece you mentioned). Typically, I use one of the standard kick mics mentioned and a solid mini-boom stand and stick the mic inside the drum per OneEng's placement guidelines and call it good.

 

If I know the drummer, work with them regularly, and they're shopping for kick mics or a drum mic kit and we can work together to find what works for them that usually is best. If it's a kit with a single kick drum, I typically recommend one of the Audix kits with the D6 and then the addition of a Shure Beta 91A suspended inside on top of the pillow. That combo on a kick drum is definitely worth the extra mic channel on the kick. I often get that WTF look from drummers I work with for the first time when they see me micing up their kick drum with that combo... until they hear it.

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The idea of tuning someone's drums for them I guess would depend on the situation. I often see drummers who work with sound guys to fix their sound. This however is almost always done when there is a close relationship between them (For instance he's the B.E. or a hired gun to work with the band). When you're the house or outside contracted sound tech, it's a little less common. I've even done this myself by asking the drummer if he could tune something a bit to get a better sound for FOH. I would think that most decent players want to sound good out front and will tweak a little to satisfy the FOH's wishes (I know I would if I was the artist). On a national level, about half of the shows I do use a rental kit (often with new heads) and MUST be tuned. This is variously done by the drummer, a drum tech, or the engineer. As a drummer, I'll do as asked by the engineer (as long as it's not something ridiculously out of left field). Hmmm different approaches I guess.

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if the drummer is clueless, and yet knows it all, you can only do a few things to make it better. If the player's dynamics are all over, you really cannot settle on a sound..

 

How does the drum sound acoustically? Decent? Then it's all mostly "free" fixes; mic choice, mic placement. adjusting acoustic stuff packed in the drum, channel settings, compression, gating, system tuning. Wow, that's a lot of stuff actually. If your system is out of whack, you'll struggle.

 

My methods:

I can generally tell how the kick's going to work after about 3 strikes during setup. So, i choose a mic, place it and go to work on the board. My first attack is the scalpel out what sucks from the tone...always subtractive first. Sometimes that leaves what you may have wanted to boost not needing anything. I HPF up a ways, sometimes further up than other engineers. Depending on the player, i'll crank up some compression. it's always inserted it but decide how much depending on how steady or squirrel'y the player is. After the band plays, then I decide how the kick/bass guitar relationship is working, whether I need to boost some attack. based on that, a gate may be needed if the boost is extreme and jacking up the cymbals sound.

 

What rarely works for me:

Bed Bath and Beyond stuffed into the drum.

No damping whatsoever.

 

I prefer a felt beater. unless bed bath and beyond is stuffed into the shell and refuses to leave.. .

I can work with almost any kick drum mic but some just mate with a drum better. currently it's the Heil PR40 that gets chosen first.

 

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Ok... well the back story on this. So it's Friday night, we're running a little late for getting it together by "start time"... pre gig socializing was taking a big bite out of discretionary time. It's been a couple weeks since our last gig... I stuck a D6 in the usual spot in the drummer's kick drum, went about my business (quickly).... 5 - 10 later I was blowing through a quick line check... brought all the pots and faders up to the usual levels, made some quick adjustments to EQ's based on the differences in venues from the last gig... everything was fine, fine, fine till I got to the kick drum and then it was OMG... what's up with this? I don't need this right now... I got better things to do with my life right now than to fuss with some whacked-out horrible kick drum sound... which sounded like a yard and a half bucket of wet manure getting dropped on a trampoline... it was like 10+dB hotter than usual and wong-a-wonga with a nasty chack attack minus the "ch". My first thought was that the D6 had gotten used to stir a punch bowl during the lay-off, so I swapped it out with a different (basically new) D6. No change. Changed the cable... no change. Aargh... so I started messing around with the mic placement... we're talking 5 minutes before "showtime" and a full house of groupies.... the resonator head on the kick drum is flopping like a fresh caught halibut... I'm moving the mic around, leaning on the resonator head to varying degrees (got it to sound pretty good at one point... but I can't play bass all night and hold that pose)... I suggested to our drummer "Do you have any pillow like stuff with you. He very coldly said: "No, WHY?" I said: Because your kick drum sounds like ass... he said "it sounds GREAT from where I'm sitting... in-fact, it's never sounded better, what did you do?" About that time the tuning nuts started falling off his kick drum resonator head. I said: "Huston... I think we have a problem." Our drummer got off his THRONE and actually came around to the front side of his drums, and said: "Huh".... "I guess my drums have been sitting in the back of my pick-up for the past couple of weeks (in 80+ degree weather)... I guess the new heads I put on them must have loosened up a bit. "YA THINK?" So he put the falled off tuning nuts back on and tightened them down a full 1/32 of a turn... "there, how's that???" "um... better" (I guess).... the front resonator head is still flopping in the breeze in the 2 mph wind storm. I fussed and fussed with the mic placement... threw out everything I thought I knew... finally found that in the likely exact center of the drum the sound was passible... just a 1/10th inch movement from there and the sound was absolutely awful... but in that one spot, the sound was "pretty good".

 

Then I picked up my bass and played for 4 1/2 hours.

 

I wish to know more about how drums are suppose to work.

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Did I write something earlier about how forgiving big drums are? Well they are but there are limits. When there are wrinkles in the head and the lugs fall loose there is something definitely wrong. That is WAY out of the range of any drum (although I have had the beater head nearly (I did say "NEARLY" wrinkled)) on a floor tom I had. As I previously stated, I prefer the front resonant head to be higher (or non existent :-).

 

Cheers

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I liked trevcda's comments regarding trying to make a drum sound the way you think it should, rather than how it does. Sometimes that takes a lot of willpower.

 

Last week I played with an excellent drummer who brought his own kick mic and proceeded to place it on the beater side of the kick. Hi kick had that funky loose blues kick sound and his mic placement boosted that feature. Anyway, I fretted for about a half a minute until my maturity or perhaps old age kicked in, and I realized I just needed to let it go. Through the PA, the drum sounded just like it did on stage, and he's enjoyed a very succesful carreer, so why would I argue with his success. Maybe if it was a night after night occurence, I would want to change something up, but it just seemed prudent to roll with it. Again, I grant you that's not always easy to do - like when the lug nuts are falling off!

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I wonder when the digital boards will be able to use kick drum microphone signals to trigger samples of good-sounding kicks?

 

Or "drum mics" that look like mics on the outside, but are actually triggers, electronics, & samples of good sounding drums on the inside.

 

For what little I know about drum tuning, either a drum is "well tuned" or not... being that if it's not "well tuned", it might as well not be tuned at-all. Furthermore, drum sounds are considerably different than guitar or similar sounds... being that guitar sounds are what I think of as two-dimensional sounds... drums are rather 3 dimensional sounds. With a poorly tuned guitar, the harmonics of each string are still even intervals... 1/2 wave, 1/4 wave etc... But the harmonics of drums are anything but even intervals... and some or much to do with drum tuning involves techniques that diminish the unwanted harmonics. Furthermore: chances are drums need tuned just as routinely as... oh... acoustic guitars and the like. And when a guitar goes out of tune, it's basically flat and/or sharp... but when a drum goes out of tune, the sound changes... and likely changes drastically (for the worse).

 

And, outside of professional drum techs at big dollar performances, in all my years and all the performances, I've seen drummer do a full-on tap tuning of their drums prior to shows... well... basically very rarely... and all-but never tune before mounting the drums on the stands. And if running resonator heads, tuning the resonator head is equally important to tuning the beater head.

 

And in-fact: It seems to me that most drummers "tune their drums" "to feel"... how it feels playing... and how it sounds from "their side"... which is generally the beater head surfaces of the drums... and what most everyone else hears is via the resonator head side... except for possibly the snare... I'm guessing that's why the snare drums usually sound "pretty good", or "better" than the other drums when miced since typically the snare is at least miced from the same head that the drummer likely predominately hears.

 

It seems that the term "tuning" doesn't apply to drums like it does to guitars... drums are not actually "tuned", but more-so are "toned". And if the drums are not "toned" well... mic placement, especially inside a kick drum might be a really big deal... because a poorly toned kick drum likely has all-sorts of nasty harmonic weirdness going on inside... and the trick would be to hopefully locate a node within the churning mass of waves.

 

I dunno...

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Your description of drum tuning/toning is actually pretty accurate. FWIW drums don't usually need to be tuned as often as F.I. a guitar and often can be played for hours /days before needing re-toning. This does depend on the drum however. Some drums just don't hold a tune/tone and will only stay put for an hour or less but this is rare. Most drums only need a touch up when the heads start to wear (stretch). Soft players will get many more miles out of a head before re-toning and finally replacement is needed. Yes it is an art in it's self to balance all of those different resonances and make them "musical". Also what you say is true in that some drummers tune to get just the right stick bounce rather than a good tone (I'm not in this group and shame on them). Also yes drums do sound different out front at a distance but where is your mic? Not way out front I'd bet (unless your in a studio). The biggest offenders of this principal are cymbals (which sound TOTALY different when miced near as compared to 20' away due to their broad spectrum of harmonics. Obviously this can never work for live SR so there's always a compromise with overheads.

 

Thanks for putting the "nasty harmonic weirdness going on inside" thing into perspective, it is a great observation on your part.

 

cheers

 

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Well... I just had an idea.

 

I actually sort-of "own" the drums in our band's practice room. I don't really own them anymore... rather I bought them a couple decades ago and gifted them to "the practice room"... easier to entice a drummer to join if there's a community set of drums that live in the practice room. As I recall it's a Yamaha Tour Custom kit out of the late '80's or early '90's... pretty nice old kit... I bought it "somewhat used" out of a pawn shop 20+ years ago and dumped it off in the practice room back then. I doubt it's been tuned for "awhile"... I know I didn't tune the kit before I dumped it off, and I doubt anyone else has since.

 

Well... I think I'll go in for the next practice a couple hours early and tune that kit up. See what our drummer, being the lungnuts falling off drummer person, and why am I having problems micing up his kickdrum thinks then. Yea, I know offering to tune a drummer's kit is typically no better received than offering to train someone's dog for them... but nobody should have a problem with me diving in and tuning up the communal practice kit... especially since I'm the one who bought it... and maybe I can shame our drummer into warming up a little to some possible help in getting to the foundation of the situation.

 

Come to think of it: If the guitarist's guitar is out of tune and the speaker in his combo amp is shattered, and his instrument cable is intermittent... mic placement won't resolve all of the problems... until the soundperson finds "someplace" to put the mic that doesn't amplify the problems.

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With perfect 20/20 hindsight, I'm thinking I should have titled this thread differently: What to do if put in a position of micing up a basically unturned set of drums? As in "make it louder but make it sound good at the same time." What to do? Hit the bar? Go home? Grin and bear it and say "it sounds great"? Re-negotiate the contract on the spot? Start pooling through the local "help wanted ads" while ignoring the cumulating mayham? Pull out your smart phone and act like you're unapproachable? Hit the bar and insist on a triple? Strike a pose behind the board and act like you're twiddling with some knobs or doing something "complex" on your tablet to "fix it in the mix"... and act unapproachable? Call or text message your wife and say you might be home really late or unexpectedly early?

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Ha! Ha! I noticed you mentioned "hit the bar" twice. Maybe once, do a couple of those other things and call it a night (at least with that "triple" in you it'll start sounding better to you :-)

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