Get A TOP-TIER Drum Sound With 3 SM57s | Drum Recording Techniques

This video is part 6 in a series of videos showing my favorite ways to record drums with low microphone & channel counts. I'm going to explore a variety of mic types, combinations and placement techniques that will help you get a better drum sound no matter what gear you have.
Continuing through the 57 journey, this video used only 3 SM57s to get a PRO drum sound. Adding the 3rd 57 allows me to switch the overheads from a single "over the shoulder" placement to a dual "Glyn Johns" placement, which gives great stereo width, floor tom reinforcement as well as some added punch fro the snare. I also show both the dry (unmixed) and processed (mixed) sound to give a better idea of what this combination sounds like as well as how good it can sound in a mix.
This video is great for anyone looking to record drums, improve the quality of their audio, or learn a new way to produce drums in general. Please comment if you enjoyed the video or have any questions about drum recording and I'll be happy to help!
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Session Drummer, Heitor Lima:
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[@jophko]

Real interesting setup, how would you see this use in a live setting?

[@woodyardmusic]

For live I’d probably move the overhead that’s near the floor Tom over to a snare close mic, so I could have kick, snare and overhead to mix with so I had a bit more control of the important elements

[@Musicman9492]

Definitely a "quick, cheap, and dirty" way to get a workable sound. Can you briefly outline what mixing you did to each of the mic channels?

[@woodyardmusic]

That’s exactly the goal of the video haha. For mixing, overheads got EQ and compression from waves SSL channel, gentle moves here because it’s a full picture of the drums. Kick was SSL channel, cut lots of mids (around 700hz) plus gentle tweaking here and there. The main source of low end for the kick was waves RBass, but boosting the lows on the EQ will work too. All channels went to a drum bus so receive gentle compression, parallel compression, and a bit of room reverb.

[@michalhimer7969]

Damn thats impressive! The only thing I dont like is the unprocessed kick sound, but that was totally fixed in the post, may I ask you what did you do to that kick? And the other drums and cymbals sound really good with this technique, definitely gonna give it a try

[@woodyardmusic]

Mostly my standard EQ and compression (you can find that all over my channel), I think I used waves SSL channel for this one. then I used Waves RBass to add LOTS of low end around 45hz. The 57 doesn’t have a ton of lows so you really need to add some to get it to feel right.