Need help recording live drums........

[C O O L i N D E E D]

so I have 1 drum mic in front of the entire kit about a 1' away, running the mic to a 1st gen m-audio fast track ultra, no power supply neither only powered thru usb to my iMac. I'm also using ableton live to record but theres so much feedback and whitenoise after recording, I can use an audio restoration program to suppress it but it takes a little bit of the quality of the drum hits itself. Any suggestions? I'm on a tight ass budget at the moment so there's no way I can afford any new hardware.

 

[Propaganda]

hmm...if you had a large cardioid mic i'd say put it right over the kick and under the ride, so that the snare is like 90 degrees to the right of the diaphragm and the low tom is lined up on the other side, cuz that pick up everything pretty well.

try from the drummers perspective. like, put it up over your shoulder and try different angles. really, the acoustics of your room is gonna make a big difference in mic placement...and when it comes down to it, you'll just have to experiment till you find something that works. based on what you said, the room noise is a problem, so i'd try to keep the mic pretty tight to the kit.

ultimately though, if you don't have a good mic and you're tracking in a bad/untreated room, then you're gonna have a really rough time getting a decent recording.

 

[C O O L i N D E E D]

Propanganda: thanks for the tip, but I actually found a really good mic placement for the entire kit (but I will definitely try what you suggested, i'm very open to new techniques,so thanks), but my problem is with my mic pre-amp, there is a lot of feedback occurring in the recording, especially on the hits with the snare. I have an Avantone CK-6 mic but no power supply adapter for my mic preamp so I can't supply extra juice via phantom power to the mic but my other mics work great it's just I can't seem to kill the feedback when recording thru Ableton. It's weird because when I record vinyl or scratch patterns from the tables they come out clear. Would you agree that it might be the xlr microphone cable that's giving me so much feedback?

 

[Propaganda]

oh, my bad. read the problem wrong.

umm...yeah, it could be the cable. obviously there's something going on in the signal flow. it could be the pre-amp - if it doesn't have protection components, they can be real sensitive to hot-swaps, spikes due to disturbed cables or something and plugging/unplugging your mic in with phantom power on. it could even be the mic itself. it's really hard to tell from here, man lol.

 

[C O O L i N D E E D]

It's all good, but yea thanks for the insight. I don't know much about equipment but your advice is very helpful, gives me options to look into. I'm bummed though, I bought all this stuff about 2 years ago and I finally have time to get it together, I mean besides the recording sounding like shyt I'm glad/relieved that the whole drum kit itself which I tweaked by upgrading the heads and hi-hat, sounds amazing. Think I might try and getting a new XLR mic cord and see if that'll help, because like I mentioned I recorded vinyl and that stuff comes out crisp.

 

[Propaganda]

yeah when it comes down to it you just gotta follow the signal path and figure out where the problem is, then you can zero in and start fixing it.

now that i'm thinking about it...and i dunno if it'll even work and it certainly doesn't solve the problem in the big picture but if you have something you really need to record immediately, take a chance and try to track the kit in individual hits, maybe that'll work without giving you the extra noise...that'll at least give you some live one-shots you could sequence with.

that might be a totally useless suggestion but i guess it's worth a try

 

[C O O L i N D E E D]

I took your advice and tracked the drum hits individually, and just arranged it but it does seem to come out cleaner-ish , I still had to use an audio restoration program to clean up the feedback a bit, it's not as bad recording myself drumming the entire break pattern,you can hear tons of feedback....weird. Man nothing beats real live drums.......