Are things being mic’d differently today?
In Studio Five, we don’t have a big live room for tracking bands, just a nice big booth. had a reputation as a drum room, and several of the producers were using 20 or more mics on a drum kit. More than one on each drum, plus stereo overheads and three room mics (carefully measured with a cloth tape. I expected phase issues, but the kits sound fantastic, and of course you can phase align the tracks after recording either with a plugin or just sliding them. I’ve mixed some stuff where the drums were mic’d this way, and you’re somewhat restricted because you have a lot of tracks with several drums on them. Levels and eq on the cymbals, for example, affect other drums to a considerable degree. My preference has always been one close mic per drum, except for kick and snare (both of which need two), and one pretty close mic (a KM-184 or 185, for example) for each cymbal. Maybe because only one of my earlier tracking rooms was as good as 4a, I didn’t get in the habit of using room mics much. I like to have more control over each drum and cymbal in the mix with close mic’ing, and more control over ambiance with reverbs and echoes than with a bunch of room mics.
We sold about half of the mics, preamps and outboard processing when we moved, but I kept enough for a drum set (we’ve tracks drums in the booth and also in the control room). We’ve done vocals in both rooms, too, but the booth is so flexible with changeable wall panels and no parallel surfaces that we usually use it for vocals. I personally like the 149 for vocals, but we’ve used U-87s and other mics you can see on the Gear page.
