Bonham was recorded a lot of different ways.  That technique is pretty old-school and tried and true.  I've used it and variants of it.  Problems I have include (1) not a lot of snare muscle, (2) kick is more skewed to the over-the-shoulder mic, (3) no low-end on the kick.  If you want a really "photographic" image of the drum kit this is a decent technique but modern rock left this sort of sound behind a long time ago.  Most people will think it's thin and distant.

darjama wrote Rip, I love the updated forum software, it's much faster, and I was finally able to update my time zone.

No kidding, the old software was driving me crazy, and this update was about a year late in the coming, so I had to keep waiting, and waiting....

Let's see some sexy avatars!!

PS: updated the articles section as well so that the comments are now working correctly.

> Anyone ever try this and use close mics on the drums?

I did, and i liked it. Miced kick, snare top & bottom, toms and room. The overheads help getting the snare and kick right. Definately an improvement for me from spaced pair or xy overhads. This drummer wasn't hitting his snare hard enough to my taste, and this helped. Tightned up the snare. If your snare lacks power (sounds too "wooshy") this setup can work.

It's not easy to get the distances from the snare AND from the kick right without the mics being in the way. Since cymbals are present anyway I wanted to focus on snare and get the mics closer to the snare.

My latest try is also a classic (can't remember where I read it): two LD overheads, one peeking over the floortom, one on the hi-hat side from the front of the kit pointing at the snare and the racktom. This drummer has two floors and I aimed the "floor OH" mic (I use an NT1000) at the kick so it adds snap to the kick. Really works and no tom mics needed.

I tried Rip's front-kick-room trick but I couldn't get the magic. Still learning and trying...