What I was using when I started recording drums!

Welcome to my newsletter!

Hey! I'm thankful that you're checking out this newsletter. My hope is that this will be a help and resource to you! In each newsletter, I hope to share an interesting story, an article I've found helpful, and some products that I think you may enjoy.

I'd love to hear from you! If you have a topic you'd like me to discuss, something you'd like to see me do or post, or if you have a question, just let me know by emailing me below!

Thanks for checking this out!

What I was using when I started recording!

When I started recording in church, I brought two PreSonus firestudio interfaces (linked together for a total of 16 channels) into the cage, added an extra set of drum microphones to the whole kit, and recorded into a computer. A lot of my early Royalwood content was recorded like this. If you look closely, you can see the extra mics on a lot of the drums in videos like this one! That worked when I was playing at my home church, but was difficult to do elsewhere due to the long setup time required.

For my travel setup, I would take a Zoom H4n (circled below in the picture) and would set that up as overheads using the built-in XY mics. To this day, this is still a decent workflow to get audio on the road as it has two xlr inputs on the bottom in addition to the stereo mics. I would position the built-in mics as overheads behind my head, then run a mic to the kick and snare, giving me four channels total. The H4n records to an SD card, making it a completely self-contained setup that is easy to travel with. I still take my H4n around in case I can't get good audio from the front of house! Here's an example of that setup in use at Because of The Times 2017. The second picture is a screenshot of that video and you can see where I have the H4n setup and the second mic on the snare.

Here's a video explaining that setup from BOTT 2017! CLICK HERE

Just for reference, I also started with a Canon t3i, GoPro 4 (I think??), and a Zoom q4 camera with built-in XY mics.

I would still highly recommend the Zoom H4n to anyone looking to get some good audio on the fly! It's a great device, and built like a tank!

Check out my Sweetwater page here for more gear I like!

---