Bob, Do you have the bass drum speaker microphone inside a cabinet or is it freestanding in a stiff wire and rod rig?
I use to have a 15" speaker mounted to the front side of a kick drum. The front drum head was removed. The speaker was suspended so the center cone was inline with the kick beater against the batter head.
Tune the inside drum head real loose. You will get a puny sound in the studio but a massive sound from the speaker microphone. Plus you don't have to stuff the drum with a blanket.
Still inside the cabinet but it does have a port to let the pressure out on the back side, so not totally enclosed .. I'd *guess* it is a little tighter that way, but haven't experimented with an open cone like you did .. neat idea and variation you had
As I'm sure you noticed, this method seems to 'move a lot of air' in the end mix from the BD you 'hear' it, but you can also 'feel' it (more in your chest than in your ears) on a decent system
I hate seeing a BD with a blanket in it, just a personal pet peave
Make your sound your own! .. I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome
Our drum recording setup for mics includes as many SM-57s as practical as well.
1 on snare (close) 1 on HH (close) 1 by the kick pedal (to get the Snap) A couple 58s as overheads .. and my special $38 dollar Audio-Technica I picked up in a pinch one night when we were short a live vocal mic 20 years ago, and discovered the thing was not that grwat for vocals, but was a nice Ride cymbal mic .. and man is it great at that; grabs every nuance and clear as can be
The final trick we use is to place a reverse wired subwoofer in front of the hole in the bass drum, about 14-16" away .. it picks up the 'boom' quite nicely, and a decent preamp gives it enough oomph
We wired the two wires connected to the speaker cone directly to the (now) output wire via XLR cable. Works a treat
We have to scoot the BD track a few ticks toward the beginning of the song after recording (or it seems to lag just a touch) but the end result is pretty cool. We could probably compensate for some of the lag by moving it closer, but we want to let the waveform develop before it gets to the mic/speaker.
If you are still reading, you are truly a recording geek
Ah, the old DIY Subkick - those always work a treat on kick drum, and bass guitar too. I'm with you on keeping them back a bit to let the wave develop, then nudging things back into phase - I do the same with room mics too of course.
Everyone's got one of those "special" microphones - some piece of junk that sounds awful on everything except is magical for one specific task - mine has absolutely no name on it and the ball end is smashed, but it sounds absolutely killer on certain styles of electric guitar.
I'll echo in a bit on the drum topic and then go back to the reason I resurrected this thread.
I'd be happy with separate Snare and Kick audio. Most of my music is jazz oriented, so big drum kits aren't the goal. But it would be nice to be able to reinforce these two parts a bit along with the stereo mix. I'm actually pretty impressed with the stereo drum parts that I've been using thus far.
Here's the song I've been working on that raised the question about stereo/mono instrument tracks. The rhythm guitars (Realtracks 1449 and 1450) are mono, which works fine in this gypsy jazz/Latin influenced take on a Green Day song. Gypsy jazz groups often have a couple of rhythm guitars, so these are panned left/right and mono is fine. I also worked in a dueling violin part courtesy of Tim Kliphuis (Realtrack 1446), a stereo track. I put the source track on a Utility track and use the BiaB harmonizer to generate a "partner". They are also panned left/right, to get the proper feel of "dueling" and trading fours. I didn't really concentrate on the stereo aspect of the violin, but I don't think of a violin as occupying a stereo space like drums or even a piano might. So I'd love to know about the mic setup for that and similar tracks, and perhaps then it would make more sense to split it into two mono tracks and do some different EQ/balancing. I didn't need that precision on this song, but might want it sometime.
Chuck Wiggins
BIAB 2023 Win UltraPak, Cakewalk, Windows 10 Pro Custom AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core, Focusrite Scarlett 4x4 interface
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