Recording: Drums (Day 1 – Rack Tom setup)

Rack Tom

Sennheiser MD421 MKii

Golden Age Pre-73

Primacoustic CrashGuard 421

This drum kit is a simple 4-piece, so there’s only a rack tom and a floor tom to mic. It makes for a nice, tightly-defined stereo image and reduces the number of mic placement issues. It makes my job as engineer a whole easier!

The rack tom was simple to mic. I used a Sennheiser MD421 MkII mic on top, with the attenuation switch set to ‘M’ (Music). This was fed into a Golden Age Pre-73 preamp, which is a great Neve 1073 clone, especially for the price (future review coming). I didn’t EQ or compress the signal. I left the tracks unaltered so I could tweak it just right in the mix. The top mics capture a good amount of attack and body, and the MD421 really shines on toms.

Just like with the snare, there were some concerns about cymbal bleed. This rack tom is right next to and just a few inches below a large crash, so every time its hit, I would get a blast of cymbal hiss in the mic. So, I ended up usingboth a Primacoustic CrashGuard and an Auralex Xpander on this mic to kill the bleed. It looked like a Frankenstein contraption, what with the Xpander foam jammed into the CrashGuard housing and a MD421 poking through, but it worked really well. No more crash problems!

We really wanted big, huge toms, so I mic’d the bottom using a CAD M179 multi-pattern condenser. Again, killer mic value for the money, and it’s super versatile — if you only had this and a Shure SM57 in your mic locker, you could still record just about anything and it’d sound great. I set it to Super Cardioid mode so that it was really just picking up the bottom of the tom. I tried the other patters, hoping something like Figure 8 mode would help me pickup a lot more body, but it just ended up picking up too much of everything. That’s pretty much was the expected result, but hey, gotta try and experiment so you know for sure. The M179 was run to a preamp on the Allen & Heath ZED R16 console; no EQ or compression.

You may have to invert the phase on the bottom mic. Play around with phase and position until it sounds right to your ears.

Lastly, I used a piezo trigger on the drum head to trigger samples and noise gates.

CAD M179

Rack Tom (bottom)