Here’s a helpful video for recording drums with just two mics and only two inputs on your audio interface. Engineer Bob Clearmountain (The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen) and drummer Matt Chamberlain (solo artist, session musician, David Bowie, Tori Amos, Soundgarden) demonstrate and discuss the best way to record drums with two microphones using the Apogee Duet.
A two-microphone setup means picking one main position and one supporting position rather than miking each drum individually. A single overhead captures the kit as a whole (cymbals, snare, and kick working together the way a listener actually hears them) while a second mic, often placed further back in the room, adds depth and natural decay. It’s a technique long used by engineers working with limited inputs, whether that’s a two-channel interface at home or a scaled-down setup on the road, and it forces some early decisions about mic placement and kit tuning that get glossed over when there’s a channel for every drum.
Music by Matt Chamberlain, Sergio Ruelas, Devon Pangle and Mairead Delaney.
Interviews for this video were recorded using Sennheiser ClipMic digital and the Apogee MetaRecorder App.
We followed this one up with Record an Acoustic Guitar & Vocals at the Same Time, another two-microphone setup built around Apogee’s gear.
Apogee has been building recording hardware since 1985, when the company’s early anti-aliasing filters helped solve some of the problems that came with early digital audio. It’s based in Santa Monica, California, and its interfaces and converters have been a fixture in professional studios for decades, from the Symphony I/O to smaller desktop interfaces like the Duet used in this video. The Duet was already established as one of the more compact, at-home options in the lineup, giving smaller studios and single-room setups the same conversion quality found in Apogee’s larger interfaces.
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