Favourite microphones:
Bass drum front: AKG D112, EV RE20, Beyer M380.
Bass drum back: small condenser or dynamic mic, often Shure SM98.
Snare top: Altec 175, Sony C37p.
Snare bottom (occasionally): Shure SM98, Altec 165/175.
Toms: Josephson E22.
Cymbals: Neumann SM2, AKG C24.
Overheads: Coles STC4038, Beyer 160, Royer 122.
Ambient: small-diaphragm condensers like Altec 150, Neumann 582.
"I have miked drums in quite a few different ways. Sometimes I'll just have an overhead microphone and a bass drum microphone. Normally there are close mics on all the drums, as well as ambient microphones, and a stereo microphone in front of the drum kit for cymbals. It's hard to describe where I place them and it varies a lot. If the drummer plays very lightly, then there's a lot of attack and not a lot of tone, and I want the microphone to look at the contact point of the snare drum. If the drummer is playing very hard and he's exciting the whole drum, I usually have to back the microphone off a little bit so that it's not overloading. For the ambient mics I'll walk around the room and see where it sounds good, and I usually have them on the floor to take advantage of the boundary effect, and to minimise early reflections.
"I'll occasionally compress the front bass-drum microphone while recording, in the same way as the bass guitar, at a low ratio of a couple of dBs. The snare drum tends to overwhelm the overhead microphones, so I'll have a very fast-acting peak limiter on the overhead to keep the snare drum from doing that. I don't normally compress the room but I'll sometimes delay the ambient microphones by a few milliseconds and that has the effect of getting rid of some of the slight phasing that you hear when you have microphones at a distance and up close. If you move them a little bit further away then they move out of what's called the Hass effect area, and when you move them far enough away they start sounding like acoustic reflections, which is what they are."
