Recording Multi-Channel Drums With Limited Inputs

 

from one of my vids

Recording drums is an art-form, and there’s many ways to do it. In today’s era of cheap home recording equipment it’s easier than ever to record yourself. One problem though when it comes to drums is many commercially available and affordable computer interfaces have a limited amount of audio inputs. Most commonly 2 or 4.

When this is the case you have some decisions to make. You can either use less mics, by going for a more distant miking technique, or you can use a mixer to combine signals into less inputs. With this tutorial I chose the ladder. I wanted a more closely miked sound on my interface that only has 4 inputs. I used a small inexpensive mixer from Amazon, and my Behringer UMC404HD and combined some channels to use all 4 channels with the maximum amount of options to use later on in the mix.

In the video below I show you how I recorded kick, snare, overhead, two acoustic toms and two electric toms using only 4 channels, and still having the ability to adjust quite a bit of levels in the mix.