Lesson 18 - Posted on 2014-01-17 by Collin McCombs

Lesson 18 was about micing drums and guitars. To start out tje lesson. Aaron explained to James and I the process of setting up and micing a drum kit. He emphasized how important it was to focus on the drums first because they would take the most time to set up. Once the kit is assembled and placed in the desired space of the room, it then must be tuned. After the drums are tuned you can begin micing. The Shure SM57 is the most common microphone used for micing drum kits, but some people us a mic with a lower frequency response for the kick drum and condenser mics should be used for the overheads. You can start by placing the mics for the kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, cymbles, overheads, and possibly a couple room mics. Depending on what type of music you are recording, you may even want to put two mics on the snare. Once everything is set up you then go to the control room and adust the levels. To do that the drummer will be playing each drum individually. While this is happening you will problably be running back and forth adusting mics and changing levels until the desired sound is achieved. Next we discussed micing guitars. For acoustic guitars condenser mics are used and can be recorded in mono or stereo. Close-micing, X/Y, and stereo spread are the most common techniques used. Guitar cabnets are usually closed miced with some sort of a dynamic-cardiod microphone and can be adusted accordingly. This lesson fun because micing is an art and I was excited to learn more about it.