Originally Posted By: rharv
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 smile



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.

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