How Stereo Drum Miking Was Invented

We take stereo drum recording for granted, but it's easy to forget that most drum kits were regularly recorded in mono until the early 1970s.

How stereo drum miking actually came about is a unique story. It was accidentally invented by British engineer/producer Glyn Johns (we looked at his miking technique the other day) during the recording of Led Zeppelin 1 in 1968.

Glyn went on to use the method with other seminal British acts including The Who and The Beatles, among many others, but it's this story that's been told in many forms over the years.

Here's the man himself explaining how it all happened.

The part about the stereo drums begins at around 1:00.

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The Famous Glyn Johns Drum Miking Technique

There's just about a 100% chance that on any rhythm section recording that you walk into these days, you'll see at least a mic on every drum plus a couple of overheads.

It wasn't always this way though, as most drum recording was done with only a very few microphones back in the heyday of the music industry - from the 50s through the mid-70s.

The drum sound from back then could be huge, but engineer/producer Glyn Johns got a particularly great sound with just 3 mics on those early hits of Led Zeppelin, The Who and many others.

Many have tried to duplicate his technique since, but few come close to capturing the sound.

Here's a real treat, as Glyn himself describes the perfectly simple setup in this very home-made video. Of course, you can also see the technique described detail in my Recording Engineer's Handbook 3rd edition.

By the way, don't miss him give the real key to sound about half-way through, which is to run the mic preamps 10dB hotter than you normally would and back down the fader!

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How Stereo Drum Recording Started

We take stereo drum recording for granted these days, but you have to remember that for a great many years, the drums were always recorded in mono. The popular miking method at the time was just an overhead mic and another on the kick drum, and that was it.

But stereo drum recording came about in a most unusual way. Here's how the legendary engineer George Massenburg tells it in the interview section of The Mixing Engineer's Handbook.

"I’ve been working with Glyn Johns, and Glyn is a master of the accidental big airy drums, of course with Led Zeppelin. It’s a great story.  

I was having dinner with Glyn and Doug Sax (mastering engineer extraordinaire) one night, and he was telling us about the first Led Zeppelin record and how they set up the drums in mono. They had one 67 right over the snare, but they always needed a little bit more floor tom, so he stuck a mic at elbow level, kind of off by the floor tom, pointing into the snare.  

After he finished the track, he grabbed the mic and put it on the guitar and panned it. When he put it back on drums, he forgot to pan it back. “Oh, that sounds great. I wonder what happens if I take the overhead and pan it right?” 

And Doug and I looked at each other and said, “You got stereo drum miking by accident?” And in that case he became well known for that big airy Led Zeppelin and The Who sound. It was a different sound than what was being done in New York, which was almost all mono, or California, which was a spaced-pairs kind of thing. The earliest stereo that I knew didn’t even include stereo drums." 

Glyn's Led Zep 3 mic stereo drum method still works today. Give it a try sometime. You might really like what you hear.

For more book excerpts from The Mixing Engineer's Handbook and my other books, go to my website.

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