Where would you put the speaker?

If you were to record a drum kit but the kick drum is from an electric kit ?
You have a matched pair for overheads , a 57 for snare , and a rode nt1a to use.

The thing is the kick sound is gonna come out of a speaker placed somewhere.
Where would you place it ?. In its traditional spot or somewhere with better distances to work with, and facing which way . Im gonna use a QSC 12 inch powered .

Im gonna do this tomorrow and was thinking about options for placement.

Room is just over 3 m high , 12 m long , 5m wide and heavily baffled on one end
( closest to the kit ,set up about a 3rd of the way up the length ) and dampened
up the sides and above for about half the length . then the other half opens up to a much wider space. There is some light blinds and carpet hanging just over half way before it opens up.

 

If this is solely for the purpose of recording, I'd put the electronic kick drum in a good pair of headphones and not have a noisy monitor in the room with all those open mic channels.

 

Hey Hawk ,Thats what I thought in my previous sessions but when it comes to mixing, I felt like Id have to spend time
getting the kick to feel like its in the same space as the rest of kit.
Oh well I m gonna give it a go anyway ,and Ill try to get an equal distance from Ohs to snare and speaker,
see if its any easier when mixing or , well I wont die wondering ....lol .
Ill let you know how it turns out

 

I hear what you're saying. If you've tried headphones before and didn't get the results you expected - by all means, time to experiment. You might even try re-amping it like you would a guitar (if you have a re-amping box). In other words, record it dry, monitoring through the headphones. Then after you've played the drum track, play the kick drum back through your QSC speaker in the drum room with at least the OH mics open. Mix in enough of the room to get the same room effect (this time without the kick bleeding into all the tracks).

Have fun with it.

 

man, im gonna suggest the headphone method again. the kick mic picks up less of the room sound anyway. youd be making one less bleed source, one less chance for the oh mics to have phase issues between the kick and snare. close mic everything else youre directly micing.
if you simply must get the room in there and a nice plate reverb wont do it. reamp the drum sub-mix back into the room with your speaker, put up 3 mics at 1 3 and 9 feet (using the simplest form of the 3 to 1 rule) and mix these 3 room tracks back in as needed. if you are going for a more aggressive sound, dude... crushing the furthest mic with anything 1176-like is going to sound nice really ^#$%ing nice.

or

set it up like a traditional kick, have your speaker at his feet facing away, that way you'll be mimicing a traditional drum kit setup and have easier access to "what already works" from the folks here on the forum.

 

A kick through any combination will not sound like a real kick in the room, and the kick always spills annoyingly so headphones, preferably in ears will be best. I would avoid the speaker if I possibly could. Spill from a speaker is far worse to deal with than spill from a kick.

 

Yeah , well I gave it a go and equal distanced the snare/speaker to the ohs but the speaker did not have enough level
so didnt show up enough in the mix , lucky I DIed it too ....lol
I think I need to try and recreate the sound of this room on valhalla room...hmmmm
Maybe if I hit a tom and then use a tom from the electronic kit that is similar (not likely ) and try
to match them up.
Any ideas on a easier way to do this ?

The kit is Yamaha express and I feel like Id probably have to dumb down the sounds in the machine to get a better balance with the live drums ( Maybe I just answered
my own question ) .
Love it here

Hey Josh Ill give that a go