Micing the bass drum batter.

DrumDoug

DrumDoug

Senior Member
As I was messing around with gear to make an in-ear rig, I accidentally stumbled upon something. I was messing around with different mics and since my practice kit is against the wall I put the BD mic on the batter side next to the pedal under the floor tom. At one point I was amazed at how much my overhead was picking up the low end of my toms. Then I realized it was the BD mic. When I muted the kick mic all that awesome low end on the toms went away. A little mixing and EQ later I had a killer sounding drum mix with just an overhead and a kick. I did an online search about micing the batter side and lots of people were complaining about bleed. The bleed was what was making it sound so good. I want to give this a try live, but I’m worried there will be unforeseen problems running that kick mic into the subs with the toms bleeding in there. It seems like it will help the toms sound big and full out front, but maybe I’m missing something since I never see anybody do this.
 
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DrumDoug said:
As I was messing around with gear to make an in-ear rig, I accidentally stumbled upon something. I was messing around with different mics and since my practice kit is against the wall I put the BD mic on the batter side next to the pedal under the floor tom. At one point I was amazed at how much my overhead was picking up the low end of my toms. Then I realized it was the BD mic. When I muted the kick mic all that awesome low end on the toms went away. A little mixing and EQ later I had a killer sounding drum mix with just an overhead and a kick. I did an online search about micing the batter side and lots of people were complaining about bleed. The bleed was what was making it sound so good. I want to give this a try live, but I’m worried there will be unforeseen problems running that kick mic into the subs with the toms bleeding in there. It seems like it will help the toms sound big and full out front, but maybe I’m missing something since I never see anybody do this.
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I just mentioned this on another thread! As you found, you do get bleed, but you can use it to your advantage. When I was running my own mixer (which I didn't necessarily recommend!) I put a soft gate with a slow release on the BD mic, and got a killer BD sound.
 
Batter head bass drum mic placement is a favorite of mine. I use it whenever I’m running an unported reso head, which lately has been quite frequently. Bleed is used to my advantage, as mentioned in the previous posts.

My placement is underneath the snare and can be seen clearly in this pic from last weekend.

IMG_4158.jpeg

*EDIT* - Here’s a small sample of the sound out front, taken on an iPhone camera. The drum is a maple 24” (x14” depth).

 
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In a simple sense, all you really want to do is make sure that whatever is coming out of the main speakers (or the floor monitors, if you use those) doesn’t get back to that exposed mic outside of the bass drum - low end sound waves tend to travel everywhere which is the root cause of feedback. So if you can somehow isolate your kit, then however you mic up shouldn’t be a problem. Maybe if your kit is behind a plexi-shield, you could do your set up all the time. I remember long ago Garth Brooks had his drummer and entire kit enclosed in a plexiglass room on-stage, which did wonders for their concert sound.
 
So much depends on the style of music and the volumes involved, of course. But I think the most commonly expressed negative about micing the bass drum from the batter side is snare drum leakage.

At first thought, it would be easy to think, bass drum low, snare drum high - the leakage can be minimized with simple eq. But bass drum sounds are just about low end - there is the low body of the sound, but there is always the attack. Even when not going for a real modern click sound, the stack part of the sound is relatively high frequency.

So we have this bass drum mic signal with lots off-axis (ugly sounding) snare drum in it. And then when we add a bit of top end to that sound, we have even more off-axis snare in the bass drum signal. Which is now part of the mix - even before we've turned on the snare mic. Meaning we then have to use less of our nice sounding snare mic sound to accommodate space for the ugly sounding snare leakage in the bass drum signal.

Conversely - if our bass drum mic is front of the BD (or even inside it), we have the actual physical bass drum attacking as a baffle - reducing the amount of snare bleed going into the bass drum mic.

Thus why it is uncommon to mic the bass drum from the batter side.
 
I sometimes do it as I use closed front heads.

But much prefer the Pat method and use the boundary mic underneath the bass drum, on the floor tom side.

I noticed a slight bit of bleed of the attack (not so much the sound) snare but its not that bad, and as plus it picks up the first floor rumble as well.
 
Use the same setup when playing a Bass drum with no port.
(BD mic on round table stand between snare and BD pedal)

Generally for smaller gigs, where its just a BD and a low Overhead Mic.
Mick
 
As I think about it, as good as this setup sounds in my drum room with only drums, at my gigs, that BD mic under the floor tom will pick up way too much guitar. Both country bands put the guitar amps on the side of my kit not far from being under my ride cymbal. I already get enough guitar bleed in my overhead. Oh well it was a nice thought while it lasted.
 
Didn't John Bonham use one? Nowadays I think a Kelly Shu would serve a similar purpose while minimising bleed (not always desired)
 
This has got me wondering if placing a mic in this position would be good for monitoring my drums when I'm using a metronome in my ears. We have a new PA for smaller gigs that doesn't have enough channels to mic everything and have a monitor sent back to my ears. When we use the big rig we have lots of channels and I can have my own mix.
 
At church, we ended up miking the batter at one time. Then one Sunday, someone nudged the boom stand, and it ended up under my floor tom. The kick sounded like crap in my IEM's, but my floor tom sounded A-MAY-ZING!!!


Just experiment with it during sound check. If it sounds good, do it. If not, move it.
 
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