Yes, You Can Put a Ribbon on a Kick Drum: The 45 Degree Position

A kick drum is the last place most people would put a ribbon microphone. It is loud, it is low, and it moves a lot of air.

The position

• Distance: ten to twenty inches from the front head. Start about a foot out, then move in or back until you find the sweet spot for that drum in that room.
• Angle: lean the microphone forward 45 degrees, so it tilts down toward the drum.
• Avoid the hole. If the front head has a port cut in it, keep the microphone away from it. That is where the blast of air comes out.

Why 45 degrees protects the ribbon

A ribbon is a thin strip of corrugated aluminum, clamped at the top and bottom. What stretches a ribbon is being hit flat-on by a wall of low-frequency pressure and moving air.

At 45 degrees the impact of the kick does not arrive across the whole ribbon at once. It travels unevenly down the length of the ribbon, so the ribbon flexes instead of being stretched.

Why 45 degrees also sounds better

This is the part people do not expect.

A figure-8 microphone hears the front and the back and rejects the sides. On an R-series microphone that rejection also extends to the top and the bottom. Talk directly into the top of an R-121 and you hear next to nothing.

When you lean the microphone forward over a kick drum, the top of the microphone points at the rest of the kit: the snare, the toms and the cymbals. So the angle that protects the ribbon also aims the dead spot at everything you do not want. The result is a well-isolated kick, almost as if you had draped a blanket over the drum and the microphone.

Hear it

Here is an R-121 on kick drum, leaned forward 45 degrees to isolate the kick from the rest of the kit.

Listen: Jodi English session, R-121 on kick drum

And here is Bobby Holland putting an R-10 on the outside of a kick for the first time, in our drum mic tour from Pentavirate Studios.

Modern or vintage

For a modern sound, add a dynamic. Put a D-112, a 421 or even an SM57 inside the drum to pick up the attack of the beater, and use the R-121 outside for the body. Balance the two to taste.

For a more vintage sound, skip the dynamic. The ribbon alone gives you a rounder kick with less click. Brian Blade's live kit was miked this way, with an R-122 on kick.

For jazz, back it off. Move the microphone a little further from the head for a more open kick.

Two cautions

• If you can feel a breeze, use a pop screen. Put your hand where the microphone is going and have the drummer play. If you feel air, move the microphone or put a pop screen in front of it.
• Cover it when you move it. Put the sock on, or cup your hand over the ribbon end, when you carry the microphone to and from the kit.

Try it

Next time you have a kit set up, put an R-10 or an R-121 about a foot off the front head, tip it forward 45 degrees, and move it until the kick sounds right. Then listen to how little of the rest of the kit is in it.

There is more on overheads, room microphones, toms and snare in our guide to Recording Drums, and more drum recordings in the Audio & Video Library.