1 Trick For Low End On Overheads (Drum Mixing Tips)

Today we are discussing low end on overheads. Now normally as an engineer when I’m working with a fully mic’d up drum kit, I don’t like a bunch of low end on the overheads. I like my low end to be coming from as few sources as possible, so mainly the kick drum. But sometimes mixing you’ll encounter a kit with minimal mics, or if you are recording at home on a budget maybe you record with minimal mics on your kit. That’s okay. There are a number of great techniques that allow you to get incredible drum sounds with only a couple mics, or even just one mic.

One of the most popular minimal mix setups for drums is the recorder man setup. This varies depending on who is doing it, but usually consist of 2 to 3 mic. At its core it is just a pair of overhead mics measured to be the same distance from the kick and the snare. This ensures the kick and snare will be in phase and in line in the overhead mics. Depending on your mics of course, you can get great drum tones with this setup. The only problem is that without a kick mic it’s very troublesome to get your low end right in the mix. That’s where todays technique comes in.

The kit we are working with today only had an overhead mic and a snare mic. No kick mic, so no dedicated low end track. To fix this and make sure we have as much control over the low end as possible what I did was I duplicated the overhead track and isolated the low end. Then on the original overhead track I got rid of the low end. This gives me a dedicated track for the low end on the kit. From here I can put the kick drum exactly where I want it. I can eq just the low end to get it sitting right without affecting the tone of my snare or overheads, and I can balance the kick drum against the snare without having to deal with the level of the cymbals changing.

This is a great trick to use is you don’t have a kick mic for your kit. It gives you more control over the low end and allows you to get your kick sitting exactly where you want it.

Give it a try on your next track and don’t forget to grab my FREE guide to recording snare drum to get better snare recordings in less time!