Audacity Forum

Hi Steve
Many thanks for your reply.
The mike I have is a "RS 249-946 280 ohms.Made in Austria" and is plugged straight into the mic input on the rear of the pc.
I did mention previously that no matter where I position the record in volume slider it makes no difference. In fact even when the pc is idle, just on the desktop with no programs (inc.audacity) running, the mike is still live, ie.tap the mike and you hear it from the speakers Ime sure thats not right.
Any help you can give me to improve my drums sound would be much appreciated
Kind Regards.

bringe.

My guess is that it's overloading the mic input of your sound card.
To get a reasonable drum sound the microphone needs to be reasonably close to the drum kit, but as you must be well aware, drum kits are *&^%@! loud.
One of the down sides of standard sound card microphone inputs (apart from the fact that they are usually very poor quality) is that they don't have any direct way to alter the input gain, all they can do is to adjust the level after it has gone through the microphone pre-amp. Consequently it is often easy to overload the microphone input.

If you listen to the kick drum part, the bass frequencies are a bit low, but it's not distorted and could be made to sound quite reasonable. The big problem is the snare which is massively distorted.

The microphone that you are using is probably not ideal, (though I can't find much information about it on the Internet), but it will probably be OK as long as you are not micing up the drums too close. What you really need is some sort of mic pre-amp that has a proper gain control on the input side. It would also help a lot if you had a second microphone. Do you have a budget to buy some bits and pieces? (it need not be a big budget

Hi Steve
Many thanks for your reply.
As I said in a previous post ive tried the mike in various positions and found the best (best of the worst) to be just above the bass drum in between the two toms which obviously picks the snare up to high.
Ive looked on ebay to find a drums mike set but they are silly money. Looks like ile have to use a drums vst or something but I was really wanting to use my own drums to give it a live sound
Any idea why my mike is live at all times as I explained earlier??

bringe.

bringe wrote: I was really wanting to use my own drums to give it a live sound

I'm not suggesting that you need a big budget to do that, but if you have some budget it will certainly help. Would around $70 be out of the question?

Hi Steve
Sorry for the delay in replying to you.
$70. is about £50. I think.Even thats more than I can go to
What did you have in mind for 70 dollars anyway, I might be able to find it somewhere at a bargain price

bringe.

bringe wrote:What did you have in mind for 70

Something like this: http://www.thomann.de/gb/art_usb_dual_pre.htm

2 good microphone inputs with proper input gain control. Nice solid metal box and USB connection.
Sorry it's a bit over 50 quid.

Add any old cheap dynamic mic to pick up the kick drum and use your good mic as an "overhead".

Hi Steve
Sorry for the delay in replying (again)
Many thanks for your ideas.I bought a cheap NEW dynamic mike from ebay for about £2.Suggested use for kareoke and
positioned it just in front of the bass drum and higher up,in between the toms and the result was really good
with a little bit of tweaking with time shift to get a stereo effect and graphic equalizer and a bit of reverb it was great!!
So ime planning on bying about 8 of them and get a cheap 8 channel mixer and the possibilities are as good as my talant.
Also I found a great FREE standalone drum machine called HYDROGEN which is really great.It takes a while to figure it out as ime a bit of a thicko,but its easy to create a drum beat for as long or short as you want then save it as a WAV then import it into AUDACITY then the possibilities are endless
Many thanks to all for your help on this subject,I guess ime pretty sorted now!!

bringe

bringe wrote:So ime planning on bying about 8 of them and get a cheap 8 channel mixer

You may not need to go as far as that. Micing up every drum is one way to record a kit, but very good results are possible with just one for the kick and one overhead. Keith Moon made some classic recordings with just three mics! (one on the kick and a pair of overheads).

Note that "overheads" are not necessarily "over head" - it just means that the mics are above the drums, but a "spaced pair" could be one either side of the drummers head, or even slightly in front of the kit. Mic positioning is definitely something to experiment with as it can make an enormous difference to the sound.

See also this article: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb07/a ... 0207_2.htm

Hi Steve
Many thanks for that link,that has helped me very much.
Ille get another 1 mike for now then but I still need a mixer so ille probably still go for a 8 channel just in case.

bringe.