Video: How to Mic a Bass Drum

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Bass drums, or kick drums, are miked by placing a microphone inside the drum itself, suspended on rubber shocks to create a rich sound. Understand how bass drums get recorded cleanly with information from an independent recording engineer and producer in this free video on music recording.

- How to Become an Audio Engineer
- How to Use an Audio Noise Gate

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Video Transcript

Hey we're back in the studio today to look at how to mic a kick drum. A few different ways we can look at right here. One, we're going to look at, this is our kick drum right here, and we're going to look at, this is the front head of the kick drum. Now back in the 60's and the 50's and the 40's the old way of miking a kick drum was to take the microphone put it about anywhere from a few inches to a few feet from the front of the head. And so most of your early recordings were miked this way. What we tend to see today in modern recording techniques is that we have the drum head that's either off or we have a hole in the front of the kick drum and the mic is actually inserted inside the kick drum. In this case it's suspended on rubber shock mounts inside the kick drum and then we can rotate it inside the kick drum closer to the beater will give us a sharp, kind of a real sharp defined sound. We can take the microphone, pull it out just a little bit and angle it left or right and we'll give us a little bit less defined but yet a very tight sound. Now what we also have here is a covering that we put over the kick drum that helps to isolate this kick drum from the toms, from the overheads, from the snare from the rest of the drums. So outside, inside, two different types of sounds, that's how to mic a kick drum.

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How to Mic a Bass Drum

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