With so much attention given to mixing in surround these days, it seems like there's much less time given to actual surround recording. Since the latest release by the hard rock band Steamroller was intended from day 1 to be a surround product, we decided to take some time experimenting with various forms of surround miking. Now I fully realize that Classical recordists have been doing this for some time, but for those of use in the area known as Rock, there's been precious little done to exploit the possibilities.

Since drums are the heart of most modern music with a back beat, that's what we spent the most time on and that's what this article will focus on.

First Take
After setting the drum kit up in the center of The Complex's spacious (40' by 60' by 22') Stage Two, we started to tune the room itself first by placing the floor to ceiling velvet drapes to cut out any standing waves and flutter echoes (The photo in Figure 1 actually doesn't indicate this since we had to pull the drapes back in order to get the mics to photograph well in the room). Since the room sounded great even before this fine tuning, it really didn't take much to get it into shape.

From there we simply augmented what would normally be stereo room mics directly in front of the kit by adding a center mic and two rears (See Figure 1). The Complex has a fine mic locker so we were able to get three vintage M50's for the front mics and two C12A's for the rear. We also set up a more or less normal compliment (57's, 421's, KM84, 47FET, etc.) of close mics on the kit as well. The surround mics were all placed about 10 feet from the kit with the front mics about 15 feet apart. Although this violates the 3:1 rule for avoiding acoustic phasing, this never caused us a problem in that area. The position was selected not on ratios, but on the sweet spot of the room and the amount of ambience required for the particular track.

It should be noted that these surround mics gave a sense of awesome realism even before we started to record. As we brought up the faders of the surround mics to reveal the sounds of the assistant finishing the setup, everyone in the control room got the immediate sense that we were immediately a step closer to reality already.

While this technique was pretty good, there was a flaw that only occurred to us a little later. This setup of three mics in front of the drums and two behind gave the listener a surround soundstage from the drummers perspective, which isn't exactly the norm. Since we were in the heat of tracking, we decided not to change this setup while things were going well.

First Take - Alternate
In retrospect, I would now probably go with what was my first instinct if this kind of setup was to be used again and put the three front mics actually behind the drums and the surround mics in front of the kit. This would then give you a soundstage from the listeners perspective. I would also set the mics up in more of a pentagram to spread things out a bit wider to really emphasize the spaciousness of the room, rather than using a configuration similar the the speaker setup normally used.

Take Two - Miking the Room
Another interesting approach came from actually miking the room itself. That is, bring the room mics in close to the drums and turn them around to face the room and not the drums (see Figure 2). Surprisingly enough, this actually gave us a much more usable, more clearly defined result. Where the mics looking in at the drums sounded just as you'd suspect, washy and ambient, mics looking out heard the room directly instead of the reflections of the room. Although this could work if only the drummer is in the room, once you get other players (like the guitar and bass player) in the room these mics tend to hear them about more than in Figure 1. Placement was at the four corners of the kit with the center mic directly in front of the kick but about 18" in front of the other front mics. This was actually so we didn't interfere with the kick mics rather than design but it worked well nonetheless.

Take Three - A Different Approach
While the room mic technique certainly provided a big, spacious sound, we wondered what it would be like to just have an array of five mics over the drums in sort of a tree. Obviously the logistics of this seemed to be beyond easy reach just from an execution standpoint of building a stable support, until DPA (formerly B&K) came to the rescue with a bunch of their tiny 4061 miniature microphones. The mics, which measure only 12.7 x 5.4 millimeters, weigh next to nothing and have a surprising frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz with a gentle rise from 8 to 20kHz, are more likely to be seen on a news anchor rather than in a recording studio. But Bill Calma of TGI, the importer for DPA, assured us that we'd be surprised by the 4061's performance. Now that we didn't have to be concerned with the weight of the mics we could construct a way to attach them without much difficulty.

After scratching our heads on how best to make a tree, keep it ridged and mount it, we happened upon some steel fence wire that was already bundled in a circle. Why not just make the tree in a circle and mount it over the drum kit, almost like a hallow? After eyeballing it a bit to determine the size (not too scientific here), we cut the wire, tapped it together, and mounted the mics with a little console tape. We overcut the wire so that the Hallow could be adjustable, making it either larger or smaller depending upon the kit or application. But how to mount it? A couple of boom stands with Shure-type mic holders where the Hallow could slip into and we were set (See Figures 3 and 4).

But the real test was the sound which was in a word, great. Big, full and spacious, this setup proved to be everything that we had hoped for and more. Not only was there separation, but what could only be described as "tone" and dimension. Listening only to the Hallow we could really hear that the cymbals were closest to the mics while the kick was the farthest away, with every drum truly defined rather than just a blur of sound. With just a little enhancement from the close mics, the results can be truly spectacular.

Take Four - I Wish I'd Thought of This
While we actually didn't try this, Scorpions drummer James Kottak did try an interesting method in the same Stage 2 just previous to our session. This method was primarily for stereo, but could easily be adapted for surround. The setup was relatively simple. A single shotgun mic 6 to 8 feet over the snare drum, a U47FET aimed at the kick but moved back from the drums until the sweet spot of the room is found, a U47 on each side of the kit at 90 angles, and a stereo Schoeps for the rear directly behind the drummer.

After hearing this described, it occurred to me that a really simple variation would be to keep the shotgun over the kit as a hard center channel, but put stereo mics at the sweet spot of the room both in front and behind the drums. These setups are on the agenda to try for my next project.

The Downside
Tracks, or the lack of them - Frankly we ate through a multitrack in no time at all and this was just with a rhythm section. I was just getting good at reducing things down to 24 tracks but now with surround recording looming 48 tracks looks more and more the norm for fewer elements.

The Bottom Line
Although we had the luxury of a large soundstage in this instance, I wouldn't hesitate to use any of the above techniques again regardless of the size of the room. Obviously in a larger room you can move the mics back and forth to time the ambience to the track, but the techniques are equally valid (maybe even more so) to gain the added spatial dimension in a small room as well.

I'm now as hooked on recording in surround as I was mixing it. It adds a spaciousness that you simply can't even approximate with outboard processors, especially since there's really no surround reverbs on the market at the moment. If you know that you'll eventually be mixing the project in surround, recording in surround from the ground up can make a significant enhancement to the final result.