Recording: Five Creative Uses Of Loudspeakers That Can Enhance Recordings

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Five Creative Uses Of Loudspeakers That Can Enhance Recordings

Vibe up dull snare drums, energize a piano, add some "room" to sounds, enhance that kick and build a tunnel

Sep. 17, 2010, by Barry Rudolph

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Recording, Loudspeakers, Studio, Techniques

4) Kick Drum Mic
I’ve used old Auratone loudspeakers when recording kick drums - the small five-inch woofer gets a low mid-range sound quality when placed close to the kick drum.

Moving further away produces a more hollow sound good for special effects.

I’ve also used the woofer out of the ubiquitous Yamaha NS-10M since I usually find them around the studio in various stages of disrepair. The 8-inch Yamaha woofer gets a lower tone - almost a TR-808 (drum machine) sound with a lot of ‘hang time’ (that’s ghetto-speak for decay length).

After soldering a mic cable to it, I prop it up on tape boxes and place it about a foot in front at an angle since air blasts from the drum can cause trouble.

These “microphones” are not going to give you anything above about 2 kHz, so you’ll have to mix in a real microphone for the rest of the drum’s sound.

5) Bass Drum Tunnels
A lot has been written about bass drum tunnels, and I’ve seen a few versions. The usual way is to build a tunnel using standard studio gobos or baffles, which I’ve seen as long as 15 feet.

A long tunnel presents the option of using more distant miking and still maintain isolation from the rest of the kit. Tunnels must have a roof made of more gobos and cartage blankets laid on top of all of it.

I’ve also read that a heavy cylindrical cardboard concrete casting form works as a prefab tunnel, and various diameters of these (up to about 24 inches) can be acquired at home improvement centers in just about any length you want. They’re much quicker to set up than dragging out all those gobos.

The mic should be put in the normal place—maybe just inside the hole of the front head or right in front of the drum. Then put a distant mic down near the end of the tunnel.

Achieve a balance and sound with just two mics: the distant one down the tunnel, combined with the close mic.

Flip phase around and try different positions before reaching for EQ, and if you’re recording to DAW, you can shift (in time) the distant mic’s recorded waveform closer to the close mic’s signal waveform timing. This sometimes helps and sometimes hurts.

And, I’ve used a shotgun mic for the distant mic for a faraway sound yet sonorous presence.

Have fun!