Record Drums - A Beginner's Guide

Drums are one of the most complicated instruments to record; not only do they take a lot of skill on both the part of the drummer and the recording engineer to get right, but they take up a lot of space and use a lot of resources to record. In this guide, we'll cover the basics of recording drums in your studio.

. If you're a Pro Tools user, you may like my more detailed tutorial on mixing drums in Pro Tools!

For this tutorial, I'll be using a Yamaha Recording Custom drum kit with a kick, snare, single rack tom, floor tom, and cymbals. Because most home studios are limited on their inputs and microphone selection, I'll be limited to using only 6 commonly available microphones on the entire drum kit.

I'll also cover the basics of compression, gating, and equalizing the drums after you've recorded them to help them sit better in the mix.

Let's get started!