As with any miking, the farther you are from the source, the more of the room you will pick up. In some cases, if you have a good "sounding" room, this is beneficial, in that the space you get from distance miking is a pleasing addition to the recording. For the most part, smaller rooms will give you bigger troubles, acoustically. What is the "roof" (ceiling) made of? Is it plaster? Drop ceiling panels? What is the size of the room LxWxH?

It is plaster and the room is 6x4m with 3m to celing. I have built a expandable vocalbooth that unfolds to an diamondshaped wall of pyramid foam on one of the 4m walls where I have the drums set up. The opposite wall has one 1x1m pyramid foam piece and two basstraps. One of the 6m walls also has one foam piece, thats it.

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Nutti, post: 405284 wrote: I have built a expandable vocalbooth that unfolds to an diamondshaped wall of pyramid foam

Be very carefull about your vocal booth constructions materials. Pyramid foam only affecte certain frequencies (1-3'' will mainly reduce Hi frequencies but not the rest of the spectrum)
You could end up with messy frequencies applied to all your vocal tracks... Any room or booth, need to be acousticly tuned.

I recently mix tracks from a home studio. all the vocal tracks had nearly nothing beyong 3k and a big peak at 200hz. He had made a booth with foam...

Indeed...up to this point I have had just one song recorded in the booth, the rest has been recorded with it expanned like when recording drums with the vocalist having the foam behind him. Around 10 songs has been recorded this way.

I will do an experiment when I find some time and check the frequency curve when singing inside vs expand booth. But when I used it the first time I did not like the complete dead sound so I never used it as a booth since...

Anyways, how about the overheads with foam in the ceiling above them? Should I do it?

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The same danger applies, foams lower the reflection of some frequencies and won't affect others. I usually put the overhead 2-3 feet (a meter max) away from the drum. For a room sound you could use an extra mic. Move it through the room and listen for the best result. You could end up with a mic at 1 feet facing a wall. Sometime the wrong way is what sounds the best... and sometime an inch back or forth makes a huge difference (don't forget to check the phases by listening to the drum in mono, then mute and unmute tracks and see if there is some cancellation. )

Btw, placing the overheads closer to the drum will retain more of the stereo field.

As PC mentioned, the closer you are to the kit, the more defined your stereo field will be. You need a very good sounding room to start with to do serious room/distance miking. Otherwise, you'll end up picking up those reflections in the room that are not pleasing, and can drive you crazy in a mix. And ...if your room has serious problems, just throwing up various layers of foam won't solve them all. You may be able to attenuate certain frequencies (generally with 1" foam it's around 1k and up) but you have to be careful that you aren't attenuating too much, either.

Also, make sure your ORTF array is spaced properly. More than once I've run into recorded tracks sent to me to mix where the ORTF spacing wasn't given proper attention, and there were phase issues. You might want to try an X-Y (coincidental pair) as well, it's more forgiving. Check your mixes in mono and see if anything disappears...

In your situation, your best way to get the best sonics is to use three people - 1. a drummer (playing on a nice and well tuned kit who has good technique and isn't just an animal), 2. an assistant to move mics around and 3. You...to monitor the changes, and direct the assistant in where to find those sweet spots.

fwiw
-d.

I did use xy for some time, but when I tried ortf I got a more wider sterefield? So after that I never went back to xy.

I don't really have access to people around here...I've played drums for about 15 years now and the only drummer I know that would be more than willing to help me is my sisters kid. He's been drumming for about 5-6 years. The problem is that he can't play. Well, he hits the drums yes, but he can't keep tempo and everytime he hits my cymbals, he hits them like they where pure evil that needs to be killed. Make's me wanna woop his ass every time and I can't stand having him as a drummer. The other thing is his so called tuning of his drums. Last time his band wanted to record something I had to retune every drum cuz of all the "pauuuuuu" disgusting overtones they had that where out of tune!

Well this got a little bit of topic, but I guess I needed to get some of the anger out :D

So it's a tricky situation since I more or less just have myself to experiment with...another thing came up in my mind is that when I set up my whole kit it's quite large and I'm not sure about the micing of it. The components are: snare, kick, 4 racktoms, 2 floortoms and 10-12 cymbals to that. So it's wide and deep. Last time I got it miced I used close mics on toms, doubble snare, kick+subkick, hihat, ride and ortf for the overheads. This feels like the overheads are to faar away from my china and sizzlecrash that I set up almost behind the last floortom. The distance from the closest cymbal to the ones in the back are huge and they get very low in volume compared to the ones up front.

Do you guys have any advice on how to set the overheads on a kit this size? Use more mics? Use a seperate oh technique?

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Try to make a perfect triangle shape (all equivalent sides) between the snare and the OV (to keep it in phase) Since you have a high ceilling open to a bigger triangle up to a satisfying sound. If you're missing some cymbals, spot mic them. AFTER ANY MIC MOVEMENT, ALWAYS CHECK THE PHASE smoke

If keeping the mics farther over is capturing more of the room sound then look into what sound your room creates, if you have some bass traps in the corner hopefully thats helping with your length and width resonant frequencies, so maybe look into what your floor to cieling resonant frequencies and if possible hang a bass trap 1/4 of the resonant frequencies wavelength from the roof. drums have a wide frequency response from your sub frequencies in the kick to the bright cymbals and hi hat and everything in between, and i've found working in smaller rooms can be difficult when capturing the room sound particularly with drums or bass amps. and as pcrecord said Always check the phase alignment between the mics