Recently, a friend of mine asked about miking up a kick drum. Currently, their drums are all acoustic and not run through the system. The drummer plays fairly quietly though, so the church tried putting a mic on the kick. According to Mark, there was a rattle in the monitors. My first thought was, “A quiet drummer?? Is there such a thing?!”

The only other information included was that the kick drum head does not have a hole in it. I like placing the mic just inside the hole when available, aimed right at the beater of the drum. That offers decent isolation and sounds a little more natural on the attack side.

What I wanted to touch on though, was the idea of the monitors rattling. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but on a quick sidenote, sometimes being the audio engineer means you must try to figure out what someone is talking about. In one of our seminar sessions, the group talked about different descriptive words people use about sound (hot, muddy, hollow, bright, etc…) and we found that we all had slightly different and sometimes completely different ideas of what those words meant.

But I digress. Rattling could be a lot of stuff. The microphone capsule could be loose, and all the air from the kick drum could be vibrating it. Too much low end in monitors that aren’t designed for those frequencies could distort them, resulting in a rattle sound. The mic might be touching the drum head, so you’re hearing the head of the drum hit the screen of the mic. There are lots of possibilities.

What I would ask though, is if the bands needs to hear the kick drum in the monitors. Now, the answer may be yes, and that’s fine. I’m not suggesting it shouldn’t be there, just only if needed. A lot of times, the band / praise team can just assume if there’s a mic on stage, they need to hear it in their monitors. By using the opposite mindset, there can a lot less audio fighting for the same space. Start with just the vocals in the monitors, or maybe 1 main instrument to keep the band together. After that, only add inputs to the wedges when the request is made. Less is more, and there’s no reason to complicate it.