In Group C, we are going to record Michael Jackson’s Beat It.

Yesterday we recorded our first instrument; drums. This week my job was to control Pro Tools, (a good way to gain some experience on Pro Tools as I have next to none). Whilst George was sorting out how he wanted the drums set up and the engineers were setting up the positioning of the various microphones, I was creating and naming tracks in Pro Tools. After creating the tracks, Charlie increased the gain on inputs 17-24 until each one was about right (it doesn’t matter if they seem a bit low as the drummer will play louder in the actual recording). I then armed each track on Pro Tools so that Pro Tools would receive a signal, and Charlie sent each microphone signal into Pro Tools using the short faders until the signal was in the yellow (or orange, whichever you prefer) of the level bar. We both decided on the correct level to have each one at. We used eight microphones for the drum kit:

Kick Drum: AKG D112 – This is a large diaphragm dynamic microphone. It is very robust and is good for picking up low frequencies. Also, quite importantly, it can withstand a high Sound Pressure Level, which is very much needed in a microphone that is used for recording a kick drum. It uses a cardioid polar pattern, capturing a direct sound with less spill from other drums.

Snare Drum (Top): Shure SM57 – This is a small diaphragm dynamic microphone, which is set to a cardioid polar pattern. This is a good polar pattern to have when recording a snare because it ignores the other drums relatively well. Despite being small, it is rather robust and can also withstand a high SPL.

Snare Drum (Bottom): Audix I5 – The Audix is also a small diaphragm dynamic microphone. It is robust and can withstand high SPL, but has a slightly different frequency response to the SM57. It is important to mic up the bottom of the snare drum as well as the top because the actual snare is located on the bottom of the drum, and therefore you will capture a more well-rounded sound by putting a microphone on both the top and bottom of the drum.

Floor & Rack Tom: Audix D2 – A small diaphragm dynamic microphone that can withstand a high SPL. They use clips to clip onto the drum, which practically can be good because they save space, with no microphone stands needed. They have a hyper-cardioid polar pattern, meaning they capture a very direct sound.

Overheads: AKG C414B’s – A large diaphragm condenser. Condensers are useful when it comes to overheads because they are more sensitive so pick up more of the sound of the drum kit. The C414 has various polar patterns to choose from, and we decided on using the cardioid setting, as we were not particularly trying to pick up the sound of the room (we had a separate microphone for that). The overheads pick up an overall stereo sound of the drum kit. It is important to make sure that the kick drum and snare drum are heard in the centre of the two microphones – something that we had trouble with, but managed to rectify by moving the right overhead slightly.

Room Microphone: Audix ADX 51 – This is a small diaphragm condenser microphone which was placed behind the drummer in an attempt to capture the sound of the entire room.

As the drum track for Beat It is rather repetitive, we decided to also record guide vocals and a guide guitar so that the drummer knew where in the song he was. The microphones that we used for these tracks are as follows:

Guide Vocals: sE X1 – A large diaphragm condenser microphone which is rather inexpensive and not ideal for vocals, however good enough for a simple guide vocal line.

Guide Guitar: Shure SM57 – This microphone was placed slightly off centre of the amplifier grate in order to pick up both the low and high frequencies.

The recording itself went rather smoothly, and the drums were recorded in two takes with no need to record any parts again.