week 4 - drum miking lesson

Aim of JJ-Josh-Sophia's experiment: To find out the placement of mics which will allow reduction in bleeding and obtaining clarity of the drums.

Mics placement:

BEFORE

One of the overheads was pointing more towards the floor tom. The snare mic was placed around 45 degree towards the snare, causing the rejection pattern away from the hi-hat and managed to pick up the hi-hat from the side. A Neumann KM183 omni mic was mistakenly used for the hi-hat as well.

AFTER

After refining their goals, in their case, which is to pick up more of the cymbals rather than the floor tom from the overheads, the placement was adjusted pointing more towards the crash. Even doing so, the floor tom was still bleeding into the overhead mic more than the crash did, therefore, the low freq roll-off is put on just a little bit (-6dB). The high pass filter is also turned on, which I assume is to avoid clipping from the cymbals. Another setup that was readjusted is the polar pattern of the overheads. The overheads pair generally will pick up the sound of the entire kit, therefore, it is not required to use omni pattern if a selected sound was to be aimed for (in this case, the cymbals). As for the selection of mic for the hi-hat, it was then changed to the AKG SDC C451 cardioid mic, pointing away from the snare drum, as it was during the initial setup, to better reject the snare (excluded from the pickup area). The snare mic on the another hand was also miked properly to reject the hi-hat (hi-hat was above the bottom of the mic, thus, including itself within the rejection area).

I also researched on a way to re-thread a shock mount, just in case.