James Taylor and Carole King who recently kicked off a whirlwind tour are carrying Earthworks Microphones as part of their drum mic kit.
Front of House engineer David Morgan trusts the tours drum sound to his Earthworks DFK1 Drum FullKit microphone arsenal.
Morgan has mixed for the Doobie Brothers, Paul Simon, Bette Midler, Lionel Richie, and Steely Dan to name but a few.
Further, he’s received eight TEC Award nominations and has won once.
When it comes to miking session drummer and producer Russell Kunkel’s drums on this tour, he trusts onlythe Earthworks DFK1, which includes four DP30/C DrumPeriscope mics, one DP25/C microphone, two SR40 High Definition Microphones, and two SR25’s.
Morgan discussed the difficulties of live miking a drummer. “Close miking drums is always a challenge,” Morgan says, “and it’s easy to lose the natural sound of the drum to the coloration of the microphone, since much of this is the result of proximity effect and/or skewed frequency response in an effort to tighten up the polar pattern. “
“When I first started using the DP30’s on toms, I was pleased to discover that the microphones’ response to off-axis information actually made the drums sound far more natural than mics that rely on rejecting everything around them.“
“By opening the pattern of the microphone to the surrounding ambient field, you achieve a far more realistic sound. If the mic’s frequency response is true—as it is with the Earthworks mics—across the entire 180-degree pattern, dead on everywhere, the result becomes the illusion that you’re actually listening to a drummer playing right in front of you as opposed to coming through a PA system.”
Morgan said he has the Earthworks DP25/C placed on the snare drum, positioned roughly three fingers above the instrument’s top head, with the two SR40 High Definition mics serving as overheads and placed about two feet over the drum kit. He also has one of the two SR25 microphones underneath the ride cymbal and the other stationed at the hi-hat.
“We love the sound from the DP25/C’s wide cardioid pattern on the snare,” says Morgan. “Russell plays a lot with brushes and sidestick and this mic picks up those sounds beautifully. We get so much detail out of the snare with this mic—we’re very, very pleased.”
Morgan also likes the performance of the Earthworks SR40’s. “We’re extremely happy with them,” he says. “They are amazingly good drum overhead mics and we couldn’t be happier with their performance. There is a depth and realism to their sound that I have never experienced with any other product in this application.”
