In this free video tutorial for Production Expert, Technical Editor and Drummer James Ivey once again makes a visit to Woodworm Studios in Oxfordshire UK to visit Engineer and Producer Mike Exeter to record drums for a track that James and Mike started work on earlier in the year for our series on recording electric guitar.

In this first instalment of four videos Mike talks about how he uses three Warm Audio WA-87 microphones to capture a Left, Centre and Right picture of the drum kit. He talks about his ideas and reasons for mic positioning and demonstrates how he keeps all three mics in phase by keeping the three mics the same distance away from the snare drum, using the time honoured method of using a microphone cable in place of a tape measure.

At the end of the video you can hear the drums first without the produced backing then just the LCR overhead recordings.

Apologies that the quality of the sound on the conversation is not up to our usual standard. We had an equipment failure and had to resort to the camera mic but we felt the content was worth running nonetheless.

You can also check out James’ review below of the Warm Audio WA-87 mic to see if it has a place in your mic locker.

Drum overhead recording is a subject that we have been talking about quite a bit recently on Production Expert. In Julian’s recent article he talks about the choice to record overheads as a stereo pair or as spot microphones.

What’s Next?

In the next video in this series, James and Mike will be looking at how they recorded the kick drum using a Shure Beta 91A and a Warm Audio WA-47 Junior.