Snare and Drum Mics Miking Joey Jordison


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This is the first in a series of sound recording presentation focused on the drum kit where we will share information, sounds and photos about recording snare, kick and other drum parts that will make it easier for clients and producers to plan their drum recording sessions, choose their snares, mics and micing (miking) strategy way ahead of their time in the studio.

That said, our primary objective with this presentation is to demonstrate the capability of Sound Weavers recording studio to create different drum sound recordings utilizing our selection of snare drums, microphones, preamps and processors. Secondly, we hope that these drum sound examples and information presented will help clients and producers in their quest to record the sound in their heads in a shorter period of time.

Joey Jordison snare drum and micsOur first installment on this series of Drum Mics and Miking of Snare, Kick and the Drum Kit will focus on the Joey Jordison Snare drum (JJ-1355) by Pearl. This snare has a 6-1/2″ x 13″ 1mm steel shell with Black Super Hoops and Masters double-ended lugs and a SR-017 strainer. The snare’s batter head is a REMO Powerstroke (that came with the drum).

The snare drum gets the star treatment due to the fact that its sound covers a wide spectrum. It has to have body and sizzle, allowing for a snare crack sound that will truly drive a beat and carry a tune. The snare drum, due to it’s loud sound (high SPL) capability usually gets picked up by every microphone in the room – from the kick drum mic to the overhead mics, thus – the snare sound will be present even further in the drum kit’s sound. For this test and samples, we provided the following:

  • direct snare sound
  • direct kick sound
  • overhead mic sound
  • mixes of direct mic with overhead mic sounds

Drum Miking signal chain.
Aside from microphone positioning and careful gain staging, there were no additional signal processing on these sample audio clips. What you will hear are the sounds of the drums themselves, the sonic characters of the microphone and the microphone preamplifier. From the outputs of the mic preamps, we went straight to our AD (analog to digital) converters (Apogee & Lynx) which goes straight to Pro Tools HD at 48Khz/24bit. The streaming audio clips presented here were bounced from Pro Tools to mp3 format (128kbps 44.1Khz).

Miking a Snare Drum. (Micing, Mic’ing)
The traditional and usual mic position for a snare drum is on top of the snare, some would place the capsules pointing at the spot where the skin meets the rim, some would point the mic on the shell, some would be midway the shell and the skin. The variations are due to personal preferences of the recording/tracking engineers, the mics and other equipment at their disposal, the sound that they are going after, the style of the music and even the style of the player. Alright, enough talk. Listen to the sample clips below.

Direct Snare drum mics .

  • Shure Sm57 to Chandler Germanium
  • Sennheiser MD421 (dynamic) to PurpleAudio Biz
  • AKG C414 in cardiod position (condenser) to A Designs Pacifica1
  • Beyerdynamic m160 (dynamic dual ribbon mic) to Great River MP 500 format
  • Royer R121 (ribbon mic) to UAD 2-610 tube

On the next page, KICK drum mic’d direct.

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