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I have made many drum covers on youtube but I find it hard to record drums. I have settled for using a decent quality camera and hoping it picks up the sound okay.

I was wondering, is there any different ways that I can record my drums maybe with a backing track without a full studio?

I have looked into prices of studio time and I don't find it cost efficient for my personal endeavours as opposed to band stuff.

As Per request:

here is a sample of a video I created on youtube best quality one I have

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  • Hi - although not a direct answer, this question & various answers might be useful to you: music.stackexchange.com/questions/16603/…
    – user2808054
    Sep 24, 2014 at 16:02
  • A good (but expensive) solution would be to buy a better camera
    – Shevliaskovic
    Sep 24, 2014 at 18:44
  • Could you provide a link to a few of your YouTube videos? That way, we could hear the problems for ourselves, and suggest the appropriate solutions.
    – trw
    Sep 24, 2014 at 21:20

2 Answers 2

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Get a decent cheap 4 channel mixer, the Behringer Euroracks or any other inexpensive mixer with 3 XLR inputs will do fine. The 4th channel is for your backing tracks. Get three mics, one short mic stand and two boom mic stands. Get a decent set of sealed headphones. For a recorder use whatever digital recorder takes your fancy: your camera, a Zoom, even your laptop.

Put the short mic in front of or inside your bass drum and position the boom mics over your kit. Your bass drum mic will have to deal with a lot of sound so it should be sturdy. Either get a specialized bass drum mic or use a Shure SM-57.

Plug the mics into the mixer. In the 4th input channel you plug in your backing track and plug your headphones into the mixer. Plug the output of your mixer into your recorder and after you've tweaked the mix you're good to go. Good luck!

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  • 1
    You may also want to incorporate room sound, either with additional mics set back from the kit or synthetically with reverb and maybe some EQ to tune to taste.
    – Epanoui
    Sep 24, 2014 at 21:03
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    The overhead booms collect a fair bit of room sound if they're set back a little bit.
    – empty
    Sep 24, 2014 at 21:10
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    Might be worth it to get an 8-channel mixer for future upgrades. Eventually you'll want a dedicated snare mic. Or if you are using your computer you don't even need a mixer, just get a 4 input audio interface and run the mics through your computer and mix levels in software (Audacity is a good free choice). That way you can use all four intputs for mics (two overhead, snare, and bass), and add your backing track in the software.
    – charlie
    Sep 25, 2014 at 19:55
  • I strongly recommend the asker to get a 4 channel interface instead of a 4 channel mixer. They'll cost about the same, but the interface will let you record the channels separately. Having the option to mix them in post production and process them separately is a huge difference.
    – NPN328
    Sep 28, 2014 at 8:14
  • An interface vs a mixer is a trade off. It depends on whether being able to mix on your laptop (instead of on the mixer) or to sub-mix for live shows is more important.
    – empty
    Oct 2, 2014 at 15:52
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There are hand held recorders, which have built in mic's but also let you record external mic's or line in. I use a Roland R-26, but Zoom has a line of quite popular and lower priced recorders. They seem to have a pretty good bang/buck ratio.

The benefit of this solution is that they record the sound from your drums quite naturally without having to bother with mixing the individual mic's. For playback during recording, either listen to the source of the backing track, or from the recorder if you want the drum sound in the headphones too.

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