If you’ve spent a lot of time on recording or audio forums, you have very likely heard of the “Recorderman” technique for recording drums. It’s a simple method of recording the whole drum kit with only two microphones that often yields good results…provided you’re recording a decent drummer playing decent sounding drums in a decent-sounding room.
In a nutshell, what you’re doing is placing a stereo pair of microphones on the kit that are equidistant from both the batter head of the snare drum and the kick drum beater.
The Recorderman technique has several things going for it:
1.) It requires a very minimal amount of equipment: two microphones, two cables, and two channels on your board or interface. Oh, and phantom power if you’re using condenser mics (which I would very highly recommend!)
2.) When implemented correctly, it eliminates the phase issues that often trouble those recording a kit with several microphones.
3.) It centers the kick and snare drums, and keeps the stereo image intact for the rest of the kit: toms, cymbals, etc.
The main drawback of the Recorderman method is that it is somewhat limited: you cannot individually pan or EQ each specific piece of the kit. If your drummer doesn’t sound good in the room already, you’re going to have problems. That said, for those of us that welcome limitations, the Recorderman technique is a handy tool to have in your back pocket.
Here’s one of the most popular Recorderman videos that effectively functions as a how-to and a sound demonstration of the this method, all in under two minutes.
At this point, I know that some of y’all are thinking “Cool! But who is this Recorderman guy?” Here’s what I’ve been able to dig up on this somewhat elusive fellow: Recorderman was the handle of a regular poster from the Recording.Org forums. While Recorderman hasn’t been active on those forums for some time, his drum recording methods live on.
While it highly unlikely that Recorderman actually invented this recording method, (actually, I’m pretty sure some of my favorite 60′s tunes were recorded similarly) he did a lot to popularize simple recording techniques in the internet era. Recording drums doesn’t have to be a great big pain at all: grab a pair of C-2s, and start laying down some tracks!
