Best place for a single microphone in a small room.

[TPO]

I've decided to try improve the quality of my drum cover recordings from the 'video camera with electricians tape over the mic' standard I was using before!

To this end I've got myself a proper mixer and borrowed a decent mic to go with it (AKG c1000). This all works nicely and gives me the opportunity to mix in the backing track rather than blasting it out over the speakers.

However, I only the one mic to record with, and my drum room is tiny. The kit is hard up against two walls, and my back is on the third, so the accoustics are going to be quite tight and I don't have any opportunity to put the mic '5ft in front of the kit' as I've seen recommended elsewhere. Here's a pic to give a better idea of the layout. The camera here is hard into the corner beind the pov, so there is a wall immediately out of shot to the left, and another to the right.



So, any ideas on where the best position is likely to be to get a reasonably well balanced recording? I appreciate that anything is going to be a compromise in such close quarters with only a single mic, and I'm not looking for pro quality. But equally I'd like to get the best I can out of it.

At present I have the mic (in a heavy desktop stand) on top of a bookcase on the left hand wall (out of shot to the left in the pic), which puts it about six and a half feet in the air, with a wal behind and angled slightly up to the ceiling. But would a lower position be better?

Any ideas or advice appreciated!

[kyle102565]

yup, place it between the snare and hats.
why not turn the kit around first though.
realistically you should have 2 minimum, one between the snare and hats the other on the bass.
dynamic on the bass, pattern mic on the snare
whoever told you place one mic 5 ft away is dead wrong, youre getting white noise. as for recording its an uphill battle for you, the room isnt made for it. my 2 mic suggestion is for gigging and the recorded drumming is going to pick up alot of unwanted stuff.

[nucjd]

You have your kit in the worst place possible for acoustics (corner of a small room). There is massive bass build up in this region and huge phasing issues. That being said, if you are leaving it there then you are going to have to test your mic in different positions ( not only in the horizontal plane but the vertical plane) in the room. It will probably take most of the day to find the best position but based on your info and constraints with space and number of mics I see no other way around this. If you have a friend that can move the mic in the room as well as up and down in the room on a stand while you play and hit the record button then it would be much quicker. Good luck.

[TPO]

Thanks for the replies, with regards moving the kit. If I turned it around the bass drum would be in the doorway and I don't think I could get in and out of the room. Besides it would just be in a different corner instead. The whole room is about 6' by 7' or something like that so there's no option to not be in a corner. That white thing in the corner is a small matress I've put in to try and damp down the corner effect, but at the end of the day the room is what it is. When I move house I'll be looking for a proper studio!.

I've been doing some playing about with the high position today and the results are reasonable. Crashes are a bit overload and the bass is a bit muted, but I think that's actually a reasonably accurate recoding of what's going on! When I can I'll get a second mic for the bass, but I have to make do for the time being.

I'll stick up my first recording once it's all mixed together, any advice would be appreciated, this is my first time with proper recording gear.

[TPO]

Ok, here's my first effort. Sound was recorded with an AKG c1000 mic, connected to a Behringer 1002FX mixer, which mixes the input with the backing track from my iPhone. I'm playing along on the monitor channel. The mic is up high above the kit, pointing at the snare.

The output of the mixer is going into the mic input of my laptop, which is recording using Audacity. I had to reduce the output level from the mixer drastically to avoid the snare and crashes clipping on the laptop. I also lowered the high frequency from the mic using the equalizer to try and keep the cymbals from clipping. I suspect the mic input has very low headroom so am planning to get an outboard USB ADC (likely a Behringer UCA202) to use instead.

The eventual audio track was combined with the seperately recorded video using Windows Live Movie Maker.

Any thoughts or observations on what I've done here appreciated. I'm new to all this and just winging it in terms of setup and configuration (especially with the mixer), so please feel free to state the obvious if I'm doing it wrong!.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWcehY6nNlY"]ZZ Top - Gimme all your lovin -Drum Cover #2 - YouTube[/ame]

[nucjd]

Looks like it is blocked so I can't view in the US.

[TPO]

Yeah, I just realied that. It's been blocked worldwide for copyright violation. Weird, my previous cover of 'Sharp Dressed Man' was also identified as copyright, but allowed to stay up with advertising (as have a couple of other covers I've done). But here the same copyright holder for the same body of work has completely blocked it instead. As this is all automated, there must be some sort of quality threshold where it blocks rather than monetising. Irritating, I appear to have been a victim of my own sucess!

ETA: Having now read up on how WMG changed thier policy on Youtube Content ID matches I understand why the previous one got through but this didn't. I've put in a boilerplate 'fair use' dispute though, so fingers crossed it'll come back up. If not and they send a DCMA notice it'll be my first copyright hit on Youtube, so nothing much to lose.