Split Drum Recording Technique

One of many ways to record drums and cymbals separately: this technique used for minimizing mic bleed, and getting more isolated drum sounds, to be able to further sculpt the sound of each instrument on the drum kit.

Let’s use a simple mic set up for shits and giggles. Start out with 4 XLR cables, 4 mic stands; for kick/snare/overhead (toms) R L. Set up stereo overheads, and mic the kick and snare, using the D112 into Ch 1, SM57 into Ch 2. Overheads are using AKG 414’s on Ch.3 and 4. Set up Headphones with a box and XLR coming out of channel A for monitoring purposes. In the control room set up the patchbay, and set all channels strips. In Protools, set up a session with 4 mono audio channels, 4 stereo aux channels, and a click track. The 4 audio channels correspond to the kick, snare and overheads and their inputs are : A1 A2 A3 and A4. Label the tracks. Label an aux track as headphones and set the input as bus 1-2 and the output as 5-6, patch out of 5 into the headphones, out, and then into room 100 A. Send all the audio tracks on bus 1-2 so the drummer has a monitor level. Now check all of your faders, analog and digital and make sure they are at unity gain ☺. Talkback will use another aux channel. Patch aux send 7/8 into protools and set the input on the channel strip accordingly. Record enable, check levels, make sure the gain stages are set, and record the drum groove with only the kick, snare and toms. All mics should be recording this. After that is successfully tracked, take the kick and snare off of record. Set up two more mono audio tracks and label them as oh L and R cymbals. Record the cymbals now with only the overheads. Hope the drummer in the session knows what he is doing and can keep good time, otherwise this process can be a mess to edit! Use the last aux channel for Compression on the cymbals. You can now squash the hell out of the cymbals with affecting the tone of the drums in your overall mix.