unmuffled kicks TOTALLY can sound awesome-- as can dual headed ones, fo sho. i rarely see much of either-- although i've recorded two bands with closed kicks in the last coupla years. when they're well tuned... aaaahh.. so awesome. BUUUuut... gads-- usually the guys who use 'em really DO buckle down on tuning, and you barely need anything on the kits in general, and a good closed kick sounds GAHuuuuuge.

most times i end up seeing rock kicks with a mic hole, and they go all rattley or sound hollow though-- recording, i usually end up trying to tune them into some sort of usable shape-- but chuck a beach towel in there at very least. just enough to calm it down a little bit... 'cause they fit through the hole overdamped sounds pretty shitely... but as they say in speaker building 'critically damped'.. juuuust right! mess around.. you need SOME resonance-- but too much can be bad. i've never tried the chris method above of NO front face and a little damping.

For my own personal tastes, the only options i spend much time considering for my kick are: 1. full front head, or 2. no front head. I personally don't feel that a ported head brings enough to the table to make it better than no head at all. The hole in the thing, in my opinion, just makes it so that it won't ring as clear a note and so will need to be more heavily muffled. And if a head needs to be that heavily muffled, then i start to wonder why there is a head there. Because at that point it seems to me it is just affecting the sound pressure inside the kick and directly outside the port, more than doing anything else "drumhead-like". A full head will sound better and tune better, and alternately having no front head on at all, will offer much more flexibility for mic placement. No-head doesn't look very slick on stage, but for recording, i really don't care what things look like, obviously.

Anyhow, if you have minimum two channels to give just for kick microphones, a closed kick can work fine for many applications.

(Rock) drummers in general though, seem to have a bit too much love for for that uberboom loose Bonham kick sound, whether or not it is appropriate or fits with the rest of the song/band(or even with the rest of the kit!).

In general, i personally find a tighter kick sound to have much more utility. And for that you need to get a mic on the beater basically. With two or more mics, it is easy with a closed kick. With one mic, that one mic is probably going to have to go inside the kick to get all of the things it needs to. It is going to either need some fancy business to get the mic in and the cable out, or that front head is going to need to get out of there.

Of course, that is more of an "average situation" than a hard rule. There certainly exist drummers, and drumkits, and rooms, where a single microphone located outside a closed kick, can work. The problem is that most drummers are nothing like John Bonham(though many aspire to it, or indeed *think* they are), and not too many recording engineers are much like Glyn Johns(ditto). And not too many rooms are like the ones at Olympic, either.

As an aside, the kick drum thing seems a little to me like that bit from the Mixerman book where he is talking about how every single guitarist he worked with, without fail wanted to use some ratty vintage amp, for everything, regardless of whether the application was appropriate, or whether it really should have been(being that he was talking about glossy commercial rock bands) a Dual Rectifier instead.

my old drummer taught me that trick about loosening the lugs to basically falling off i love the way that sounds with not a whole lotta stuff in there- i probably stuff 'em a little more-- but i'd bet NO front head probably cuts down on the ring-- it's always that 'klang' sound bouncing around the inside of an empty drum with a front head that makes me a little nutty. i'd bet it's probably a tuning thing- or mebbe just the wrong beater? the last project i did with a drummer-- he'd been playing like... 8 months.. so his tuning ability was sorta limited. we did the tune it super low thing, and i think he felt a little weird about the kick response, cause it was a little slower than he had it.. but in the end, it sounded pretty decent. i think i shoved the mic in a little TOO close to the beater anyhoo.. but it worked for the recording- it just wasn't mega huge bottom end 'cause i probably rushed it a bit.

i've been thinking about trying to just use an LDC-- either beater side or front side lately to avoid the whole 'in kick' thing, and get a better picture of the thing in general. kicks are super weird to get to sound right, for sure- and i gotta agree-- getting a band to sound cohesive-- it's super hard to get a kick to sound appropriate sometimes, and one of those vexing eternal problems for me. its just too damn fun though.

The problem with the whole "rawk kick drum" sound, is that it doesn't really exist in nature. Now, I've no issue with the inside kick mic, and tend to rely on it quite a bit in the contexts I've been mixing real drums in the past couple years. Now, given the drummers and kits I've been working with are sort of the exception to the rule... And both those guys have minimal muffling in old 24" kicks, if that means anything.

I did wind up remixing a Garda track last week and the D112 in the kick held its own; the outside mic had too much crap (read: room; I wanted a drier kick) in it. I should post it up when I'm not at a coffee shop- still no intarwebs at home.

Now, I've done a fully-closed kick on a metal session before, with a Sennheiser e602 out front. And if the drum didn't sound like ass, it wouldn't have been half-bad.

LDC would be cool, methinks. A closed kick... would, Dan, for the stuff you tend to record, almost make me want to try a ribbon. Though depending on the weight of the guitars that might take some odd EQing up top to get it defined. LDC might be the way to go.

It is a bastard instrument.

no kidding? a ribbon, huh? the natural eq IS probably just about right, and the natural compression of the thing could be just the ticket too.

the only thing that might be difficult to get the top end right with the backside of the mic open to the rest of the room! i usually add SOME top end just to get the attack right, and it could pick up a lotta guitars in the attack-ish eq area. but if given the space... fig 8's never seem to disappoint for getting the scale of things right in my favorite sorta way.. so you might well be right- and the closed drum keeps too much air from moving around.

cripes.. i wish there were enough time in the day, and enough bands to do perpetual experimentation with. heavy sigh.

1. Gobos! You can probably build a few from whatever crap you have lying about/can scrounge up. And I'm sure there's something not horribly reflective that's readily available (for cheap or free) to put on one side of 'em too if necessary.

2. Know anyone with a kit laying about they're not using?

too true. those will be built when the rest of the room's built.

OH-- news flash! the electrician has come out to give an estimate for the 100amp service to the geerage- so wheels are in motion for the buildout!