Mic’ing drums in a contemporary worship environment is a learned craft and skill that relies on technical know-how, a musical ear, partnership with musicians (and the drummer in particular), favorable acoustics, well-behaved speakers, reasonable financial investment, and lots of patience. How’s that for mix of encouraging and disheartening words?
The need for sound reinforcement in contemporary worship and gospel music is similar to that in modern pop music (including R&R, R&B, soul, funk, electric folk, etc.), especially where musical content and electroacoustic needs are concerned. The drum kit’s position in the music and the mic techniques employed are the same as for pop music and, unfortunately, the rather long list of potential problems that can plague sound folk and drummers alike are a good part of this equation.
There are a number of misinformed concepts about drum sound in pop sound reinforcement and these are equally wrong when applied to sound reinforcement in contemporary worship music. Here’s the shortlist of misinformed ideas:
- In smaller spaces drums do not need to be mic’d….. everyone can hear them just fine.
- For “pure” drum sound you should use a minimalist mic technique consisting perhaps of an overhead (or two for stereo) and a supplemental kick drum mic.
- Drummers rely on feel and this equates to striking at whatever force they need to
- If drums are too loud, we can just throw up some absorbing materials and this will really improve things.
- If drums are too loud we can just buy inexpensive plexiglass shields and this will minimize the volume levels.
- If the drums are too loud, we can reduce the volume levels with properly designed acoustic gobo’s and then add monitors so the drummer can hear his drums at the volume he/she wants.
- If the drums are too loud the answer is to buy an electronic set.
Where We Came From
Somewhere during the 1950’s-1970’s, during rock-pop music’s
formative years, a number of practices were developed that shaped how we perceive
drums in the music we are discussing. Virtually all of these mic’ing
techniques and their resulting trademark sound were derived in recording studios.
Many of them were developed for very good reasons relating to recording technique
and some were sheer accidents that someone was savvy enough to recognize as
worthwhile and didn’t record over. The basic aural attributes of the
majority of drum sounds that we employ and love are clarity, distinctness,
power, and controlled tone with pronounced attack. In some cases, there have
been intentional efforts to minimize one or more of these. (I think back to
some of the seminal recordings from the 1970’s-80’s, wherein the
drums sound like very well-recorded cardboard boxes – with no tone whatsoever.)
But, overall these are what we recognize as key ingredients to great drums
sounds.
Another fact of life in drum recording and reinforcement is that seldom does the sound that we strive for have much to do with the acoustic sound of the kit. Let me put this another way: Great sounding drums in live sound are completely unreal. They are not natural. Period. What we hear at the kit is not what we want to hear out of the FOH system and it is not what the drummer wants to hear from his monitor, typically. Now don’t get in a tizzy if you are thinking of jazz drums, ethno-folknew- age drums or any other musical style in which it is desirable to faithfully “capture” the real sound and reinforce it. That’s not what we’re talking about here. So much of pop music (think post early Elvis and Little Richard) is distortion, not just in the case of cranked-up guitar but also grossly exaggerated and manipulated vocals, keyboards, saxophones, organ, ambient effects, etc.
Why We Continue In This Fashion
Aside from the musical merits of providing the same “in your face”
drum sounds that virtually all popular rockinfluenced music employs to very
good effect, there are very good live soundrelated reasons to pursue the techniques
that we do. No matter what level you and your church may be on, from the lowest
of hodge-podge, hand-medown, and donated subgarage band sound systems to the
most wellendowed megachurch with unlimited equipment and designer budgets plus
technical crews that fell off the last Sting tour, we are all fighting the
same live sound battles. In order to retain good, clear microphone pickup we
need to reject the ever-present leakage that permeates every stage and platform
under the sun. To this end we must employ close mic’ing and utilize large
amounts of playing and mixing chops to ensure that each drum hit is captured
with a minimal amount of noise. ‘Noise’ is employed here just as
it is in other instances of signal-to-noise that we in audio always have to
deal with.
Each drum that we have so meticulously mic’d and is so wonderfully wacked by the incredible drummer is also a noise source for any and all of the other mics typically employed on a drum kit. This is where musical technique along with audio technique come into play and are of equal value.
The basic fact of life here is that in the process of close mic’ing each drum so that we have in-your-face drums sounds, we create the potential for an electroacoustic time-smearing quagmire of multiple sources that get mixed together and result in indistinct and mushy drums sounds. How is this so? Simple. Take that snare drum with the very closely placed Shure SM57 that is aimed down toward the drummers gut. Now look over there at the high rack tom with its equally close-placed mic that is pointed down toward that drum. What happens when the snare is wacked? First, the snare mic captures that snare sound and it is fed into the mixer. But that same snare wack is also picked up by the high tom mic which is 30 inches away. The SPL (sound pressure level) of the snare at the rack tom mic position is perhaps 1 dB lower (at best) than it is at the snare mic. This tom mic is also fed into the mixer and when the two microphone signals are combined into a mix bus, there is a significant series of cancellations (comb filtering) due to the timing disparity of the two signals. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We also have a low rack tom mic (36 inches away from the snare mic), a floor tom mic (42 inches away) and one or two overhead mic’s (about 36-60 inches away), plus the hi hat mic (which is perhaps 15inches away) that, despite its cardioid pickup pattern and being shadowed from the snare mic, still picks up plenty of snare wack. Incidentally, this is one reason why sheer plexiglass shields are likely to do as much as harm as they might do good. Take the above scenario and add a huge number of reflections that each drum wack creates as it impacts the drumshield and bounces directly back into the drum mic’s. What are we doing here?
Well for one thing, what we might try to do is go the minimalist route. Obviously, if we use only two overhead drum mics then all of this multi-sourced timing garbage is minimized to a great extent. But there also goes the “in your face” drum sound we need and we are also subject to leakage from every other sound source on the platform, partly because these overhead mic’s will need to be run hotter and more “full-range” than they would be if they were there just for the cymbals. Just to be clear, for acoustic jazz/folk/ethno stuff this may very well be the preferred method, but not for contemporary worship music.
Another very good reason why we need to close mic and provide in-your-face drum sounds is that the music we provide is very complex and dense. In the process of keeping repetitive snare and kick drum hits distinct in the sea of competing sounds (including bass, keys, guitars, solo voices, ensemble voices, choral voices, horns, ambience, etc), we rely very heavily on sheer clarity and punctuation of the percussive drums sounds. This also applies, by the way, to other percussive sound sources such as bass (walking or slapped) and piano. This clarity is achieved by close mic’ing and tuning the drum kit in the player’s style or skill.
Speaking of drum tuning, this is a very large component in how successful we can be in achieving musically pleasing drum reinforcement. It’s the old “garbage in, garbage out” scenario that permeates what we do in audio. Yes, the quality of the drum kit is very important, but the best, most expensive drum kit can sound quite horrible if the player does not know how to tune it for the musical style and for the environment in which the kit is being played.
Starting With a Good Sound System
Offering advice on how to mic drums for sound reinforcement without first clarifying
the sound system requirements is foolish, in my opinion. Nothing we might do
to try to improve drum sounds will be as effective as first starting with a
carefully designed speaker system that is optimized for maximum performance.
Timing errors that occur between multiple drivers and that are not corrected
or minimized are the key component in lousy phase response in a speaker system.
Poor phase response equates to negatively impacting the sound put through a
speaker system and in particular percussive sounds. Regardless of what style
of music you’re dealing with and the methods you use for mic’ing
(close, distant, area, etc), without a well-behaved speaker system you are
limited in the clarity you can achieve.
The Tools We Use
In Part-2 of this article I will discuss specific drum mic’s, their placement,
and the varied methods available to maximize their performance. I preface this
by stating that exact mic choice is as subjective as it is objective or certain.
That being said, there are tried-and-proven microphone types and specific devices
that continue to prove to be effective in the majority of applications and
musical/playing styles.
