Last night I started working on the new full length recording project by local RVA rock band, The New Outliers.  The Outliers decided to take the (now common) DIY approach of recording most of the basic tracks (drums, bass, guitars) in the converted garage that doubles as their rehearsal space.  The remaining vocal and guitar overdubs will be finished at my home studio once the basic tracks are completed. The goal last night was to get the drums mic’d up and dialed in so that we can start tracking songs next week.

The band will be playing the songs together but we will be running bass and guitars direct and using amp modeling, so as to have the best separation as possible for the drum mics. This type of technique works really well when space is limited but you still want to get a full-band performance out of the basic tracks.

The New Outliers could probably be considered an anomaly these days as they write pretty straight-forward melodic hard rock consisting of two guitars, bass, drums, and vocals.  Maybe it’s the stripped down 4-piece kit that Kevin Shell, the Outliers’ drummer uses, or having some of recent Led Zeppelin reissue playing on repeat at my house, but I felt that this was the perfect opportunity to use the “Glyn Johns Method” for recording the drums.  For those not familiar, Johns is a well known British producer/engineer whose recording career spans the gamut of rock n’ roll royalty including the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Who, and of course Led Zeppelin.  He is known for pioneering a method of mic’ing drums that is known for its’ unusual overhead mic arrangement. The key to the method is to keep both overhead mics equidistant from the center of the snare.  One mic is placed directly about the snare and the other is positioned off to the side of the floor tom looking directly at the snare.

I chose a matched pair of Cascade Fat Head ribbon microphones to use in the two overhead positions.  Ribbon mics tend to have a darker tonality compared to condenser mics, which works well in taming the brashness from the bright crash cymbals and large 15” diameter hi-hats that Kevin favors (the same style as used by Dave Grohl). The mics were each spaced 49” from the center of the snare in order to give the overtones from the kit plenty of time to develop and also pick-up a little bit of the sound from the room.  I mic’d the kick drum with the tried and true AKG D112 placed inside the kick about 6” from the center of the beater head.  This isolated the mic from outside leakage and added more punch to the overall tone of the instrument.  I placed a Sennheiser MD504 as a spot mic for the snare top.  The MD504 has a little more crispness in the top-end compared to the Shure SM57 that is a go-to for many snare drum tracks.  Since I was using darker mics for the overheads I wanted to make sure that I could capture some of that tone with more attack on the snare hits.  Finally a Blue Spark Condenser was placed about 4’ from the kit as a room mic. This track will most likely be heavily compressed in the final mix and added in as an additional flavor to enhance the over sound in the drum buss during mixdown.

The resulting sounds from this setup were very pleasant.  I got a really nice stereo image of the kit by panning the two ribbon mics hard left and right.  The spot mic on the snare adds some sizzle and snap to that part of the kit, and the kick sounds beefy and full.  This is all without any additional EQ or compression, so I feel like I have a really good foundation to build upon with this setup.

Next week we start laying down the basic tracks for the album.  Stay tuned for Part 2!