In late 2019 Yamaha drafted me in to capture the promo shoot of Idles Drummer Jon Beavis in North London. Recording drums can be a tricky procedure due to the sheer amount of mics used for simultaneous capture. Keeping everything isolated is key but also really utilising the over heads as your main source capture and individual drum mics as reinforcement. Pretty standard practise in a studio, not so much in an empty warehouse.
The video below should give you an idea of the scale of the building… I think I counted a reverb time of around 8-9seconds.
Ouch, this will be interesting! The usual suspects for micing came out and off to work we went… not trying to do anything clever to try and combat the room… we can work that out later!
Outside of the desk, the line check was monstrously thunderous… I think that’s the only way I can put it!
With the cans on and listening to the capture it was surprisingly timid… It certainly gave no sense of scale and very much sounded like a bit of room reverb added in post…
I grabbed a couple of Shure BG 4.1’s to add some ambient mics and after a bit of adjusting we had a stereo pair that we could dial in and control the room. It sounded massive and it was very very fun to play with!
Here’s the audio without the ambient mics:
And here is the final version!