There are many ways to make improvements to your drum sound, some obvious and some not so obvious. Drums are one of the most complex instruments to mic and mix because of the large number of individual microphones in proximity to one another. While your drum kit and your situation will be unique, here are a few tips and tricks to squeeze the best possible sound out of your kit each weekend.
Focus on the Source
I’ve rarely heard a great-sounding drum kit ruined by a bad sound engineer. If a kit is well tuned and it’s miked properly, it’s hard to make it sound bad. That said, it’s almost impossible to make a poorly tuned drum kit sound good using EQ and compression. If you put a bad sounding kit through a great PA, guess what? It’s going to sound bad. I will be the first to admit I am no expert on maintaining and tuning drums. One of my colleagues at our church is an active professional musician, and he deals with a lot of our musical equipment maintenance. We also have a great drummer who takes good care of our kit. Beyond that, we’ve done a few things over the years to make sure that our kit sounds awesome every Sunday. First, we change heads regularly when they start to get worn. In the past, we’ve taken the kit to a local drum shop where they change the heads and tune the kit for us. More recently, we’ve brought in an excellent local drum tech to clean, maintain and tune the kit.
Try Compressing Your Overheads
We recently moved into a new building for our Contemporary Worship services. This gave us the opportunity to start over from scratch, completely zeroing out our console after years of building upon the same show files. As much as I loved starting from scratch, I learned some hard lessons as a result. One problem that I ran into was that I couldn’t seem to keep the snare dynamics in check. I was crushing the snare mics with compression, and nothing seemed to tame them. It was bothersome to the point where I was dialing high-midrange out of the snare just to get it to sit in the mix during loud passages. Then it came to me. I had yet to apply compression to my overhead mics. Despite absolutely punishing the snare mics themselves with compression, the snare coming through the overhead mics was causing it to pop out in the mix. I put my compression back on the overheads and it was a quick fix for a perplexing problem.
Don’t Neglect the Ride
I’ve seen this time and time again, to the point that it has become a pet peeve of mine. The drummer is rocking away on kick, snare and hat. They switch over to kick, snare and ride, but where’s the ride in the mix? Poor ride. It’s such an oft-neglected cymbal. I became obsessed with how the ride was mixed into the larger drum kit sound after listening to one band’s live recordings and hearing how perfectly the ride was placed in the mix. Since then, I’ve always miked the ride independently from underneath the cymbal.
Gate Those Toms
Love them or hate them, gates are an essential part of the live sound engineer’s toolkit. Over the years, I’ve met plenty of people who say they don’t use gates at all. I can understand where they are coming from, and I appreciate their sentiments. I don’t really fall into that category, and I feel that gates are an essential part of a clean and modern drum sound, at least the one I go for in our worship services. The use of gates depends on the musical style and the drummer’s style, and gates can ruin a drum mix just as quickly as they gated out those crash cymbals. Used properly, however, gates can make a world of difference on your overall drum sound.
There are a few rules that I follow when using gates on my own mixes. Of course, there really are no rules, and you’re free to do whatever you like, but here are some of my own techniques. First, I rarely gate my kick or snare. For the kick, if it’s well tuned and stage volume is under control, I just don’t have a need to do it. I always feel like I lose attack and punch on the kick when using a gate, no matter how well dialed in it may be. For the snare, there is just too much nuance that is lost when using a gate. There are certain styles of music where a gated snare is appropriate, but for what I do, a gated snare causes me to lose detail and nuance that I desperately want to maintain.
Toms are where gates make a huge improvement in my overall drum sound. Gating the toms drastically reduces crash cymbal bleed and makes a tremendous difference on the snare by minimizing phasing issues and keep my snare dynamics in check. I’m careful not a gate the toms too tightly because I want them to breathe, and I don’t want the gating to be apparent when the toms are played. I’ll keep my range or depth setting to around -12dB. That provides enough gain reduction when the gate is closed while keeping the transition between an open and closed gate smooth and transparent in the mix.
At the end of the day, signal processing can only do so much. Drum tuning, mic selection and mic placement account for 75 percent of your overall drum sound. From there, it’s all about fine tuning what you’ve got for your PA, your room and your mix.
Vince Lepore is the technical director at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Orlando and teaches live production at Full Sail University.
