Re: Steve Albini on recording drums.
You're welcome.
Dude is known for his drum sounds.
Since he works to tape exclusively, though he often throws up a lot of mics, I'm betting that stuff's summed down on the board going in. (ie. top/bottom mics on toms, etc. There could be three mics on a thing, but they go down to one track.) I get around this by bussing in the DAW and doing the heavy lifting on the busses. It's a bit of a fudge but it works. I could have seven room mics up on the drums but that shit's a stereo pair when I'm done with it, on one fader. Everything I read, hear, see from people whose work I really respect or even do myself tells me "commit to a sound going in", which the current dominant paradigm explicitly tells us not to do.
Drums are a tricky bastard. I have no problem throwing up a ton of mics on them, but what I'm actually using in a mix, well... Honestly, with a good drummer, you can get away with very few dependent on the song and placement. I like to think of the bulk of the sound as being the overheads, with whatever else to buff it up as necessary. That's pretty well the opposite of the modern metal thing that treats the overheads as cymbal mics and tries to eliminate the snare- that's where the attack of your snare and toms comes from!- and why that genre gets shitty snare sounds, because the top head of a snare isn't something you put your ear against.
Also, Albini's point about pulling the mics back is relevant. I prefer that, because to me it sounds more like the drum really sounds in the room. He also mics the batter side of the kick, which is unusual. I've never tried it. I've taken to liking the side of the snare shell, as has my drummer. I'd actually like to try that on toms- there's things I hear in the room I don't hear on record. But toms are an odd bastard; you can compress and even distort the crap out of the close mics as long as the overheads are there and they still sound right. And you can distort kick and snare pretty hard, especially in parallel.
But I digress.
One of the most interesting instruments to record. Guitars are simple. Drums, not so much.
