MOVED: Recording drums for Suburban Light

[Nam]

Hi Alasdair,

I chose this venue for this question so that many people could benefit from the knowledge. I hope to start including a drum set in my Tascam 488 recordings and I want it to sound as professional as Suburban Light (the drums sound so solid, almost as if they alone were recorded in a studio). I know the album was made years ago and you probably didn't keep a journal but can you tell me anything about how the drums were recorded? If you used one mic or many, where the mic(s) were placed, the general type of mic, if all the mics fed into just a few tracks?

(Yes. This is the Holidaymakers Nam, in case you had any doubt after the backward technology geek-ness of the question and all the parentheses!)

Nam

[MarkMK]

Here's a post from Mark Keen that I've managed to resurrect:

Hiya! I'm not 100% sure but for It's Art Dad and Suburban Light I have a feeling all the mics on offer were SM57s.. and there might just have been two of them! One near the bass drum and one near the snare! We added a couple of overheads for the Violet Hour and maybe one room mic but I'm afraid we weren't very scientific about it and now we've had the luxury someone record the last two albums for us, none of us have taken a blind bit of notice about the recording process (well, at least I haven't!) sorry.. I will for the next album, promise!

And another post from Eponymous that might prove useful:

Here's a link to a detailed piece on "the Glyn Johns method". It seems to work: http://homerecording.about.com/od/recor ... _johns.htm
I use a modified version of this and it works OK. The modification is that I don't follow the instructions and I do what I bloody well please. But, I do generally hold to the principle of using the snare mic and the floor tom mic to record across the kit from each side.

I used to fart about for ages with close mic dynamics and overheads condensors and found that I mostly just had 1) lots of extra tracks to mix and 2) lots of spill from those noisy guitarists and bass players. Since then I have found that just close mic'ing along is fine, particularly if you use a bit of the Johns method to get a bit of ambient room and stereo separation.

I love the drums on Clientelle recordings. Always very crisp and lively. Like Mark really.

Hope that helps, Nam!