Drums...Drums in the Deep

The first three items on the Production Bible refer specifically to drums:

1. EQ at the source. 
2. Tune drums with precision. 
3. No dynamic mics on drums. 

I contacted a drummer from Harrogate named George Farrar. A young fellow with an already impressive resumé, he came highly recommended. He is a tight, solid drummer and brought a great feel to the track.

George Farrar

When placing mics on the kit, I made sure to follow commandment #3 (at least at first). I used a pair of Beyer M160s for overheads, following Ken Scott's suggestion of only using ribbons as overheads to soften and warm the strident quality of cymbals captured on condensers. I placed an AKG414 on the snare and an AT4022 pencil on the hi hat. I used AT4050s on the toms, which I was skeptical of at first, but they gave me the best tom sound I've ever captured. The rack tom mic got a lot of bleed at first from the crash cymbal, but switching it to figure-8 reduced this significantly.

Audio Technica AT4050s on toms

The kick is where I ran into real problems. I started out with the Audio Technica ATM250de, a dual-element microphone that has both dynamic and condenser capsules housed inside of it. I placed it inside the kick and turned up the faders to hear a bouncy, basketball-type sound. Didn't like it. Further investigation after the fact revealed that I didn't place it properly as the capsules weren't aimed at either the beater or the reso head. In the future, I'll be trying out the mic properly. For the purposes of my drum session, however, I found it best to save time by flagrantly breaking Epworth commandment #3 and opting for a Beyer Opus 65 dynamic mic. After trying it inside the kick, I placed it against the reso head and got the sound I was after.

Beyer Opus 65 on kick

As far as commandments 1 and 2, we made sure to tune the kit to our liking. Instinctively, George was already on it before I even said anything, because he's a pro like that. He had the snare all tuned up like he normally would when I asked him if we could go deeper and warmer. He tried that, then suggested we look at another snare altogether. So we traded out the DW brass for a deep maple snare. It definitely did the trick. We tuned it nice and low and I thought it sounded great, especially through the ribbon overheads.

Meticulously tuning and auditioning snares

Here is a sample of the final product, largely unmixed: