If you could slap together the the cheapest but still serviceable way to mic and record a basic drum kit, what would it be?

We have a couple of cheap vocal mic's available to use, and I am not going for super great quality here. I figured with a couple overheads he can pull of a Glyn Johns, and he works at samash so if there is something he needs to buy new, it would help if they carry it so he can get that discount. We also have a scarlett 2i2 or whatever that he can borrow. I know 4 inputs would be ideal but hey, what are ya gonna do?

Seeing as I live in NY now, workshopping song ideas with the drummer is a bit difficult. I can just run into the eleven rack ... him not so much.

How cheap and serviceable is cheap and serviceable? That's really the question. A single whatever can work, if you just need it to be heard for demoing porpoises. A 57 is fine. If you care enough, whatever LDC you have sitting around just for the frequency response. Throw whatever in the kick if you have another channel as it's usually the first thing to disappear.

You're not wrong re: the Glyn Johns thing for more-or-less anything rock flavored, though I think for modern high gain guitar stuff you'd really want to reinforce the toms with something. Sounds great soloed, but the low end gets lost in the mix without the close mics; the guitars eat it up, especially with low tunings. My friends and I have tried this. For death metal. It's a good sound, but you wind up dicking with it and wishing you'd thrown up a couple more 57s.

If you're just trying to get writing ideas down and not production concepts, anything you have sitting around will work. One overhead, and something down low so you can hear what the kick is doing clearly should be enough. Again, the kick is the first thing to get lost, so it's the first thing to get buffed up with another mic.

If you have four inputs and want potentially releasable tracks within your genre, well, that's a different animal. If this is not intended to ever be released, all you have to do is cut through the guitars. Mono overhead and a kick mic. Presuming you have a normal human drummer, you should be good.

Yarr, i am with snaxo re: single straight overhead + single kick.

Glyn Johns placements actually work best IMO with three+ mics. It is great for the snare and cymbals and floor tom, but can seem to be missing some pieces when mixing time comes, if the drummer isn't bonham and/or the room isn't abbey road studio 2.

For more home recordy environments, i wouldn't do GJ with less than three mics if i could help it, and i lean towards four these days for it.

For two channel, the best+simplest is one straight overhead, and one on the kick.

Alternately, if the drums are doing their thing on their own with no other instruments going in the live room, i am a big fan of the omni pattern mic. I have a relatively ratty old PZM here that i just chuck on the floor when i am feeling lazy and it does a really impressive job of picking up the drums. Either about 3-6 feet in front of the kick on the floor, or i have even put it underneath the snare before when i wanted the mix to wind up a bit more snare focused.

An omni is cool because you can just move it closer to things you want louder and further from things you want quieter. As a truly ghetto solution to just getting practices logged and shit you can arrange the drums and bass/guitar amps more or less equidistant to the mic and get a totally passable balanced sampling of all of them. A PZM/boundary is nice also because it really can do a nice range of lows and highs, especially when lying on the floor or mounted to a wall or some other large flat surface.

The main downside to an omni though is similar to the downsides of the more simple arrangements of glyn johns style. If the kit is not balanced and drummer is not balanced then the recording won't be. If the cymbals are massive and the drums aren't, or if the drummer slams on the brass in general, that is mostly what you will hear. If the drummer plays like they are being recorded(i.e. heavy on the snare+kick+toms, light on everything else) simpler mic setups can work great.