Recording Drums with the New Focusrite Scarlett OctoPre - 16 Microphones and Sound Samples!

One thing I've been doing a lot of lately is recording drums. I've caught myself running out of inputs. At the heart of my studio is a Clarett 8PreX. With eight built-in preamps/line inputs and lots of digital I/O, there is plenty of room to expand. Enter the new Scarlett OctoPre. If you haven't heard of the Scarlett OctoPre and Scarlett OctoPre Dynamic, check out this article. To connect the OctoPre to my Clarett 8PreX, I used a word clock cable out of the Clarett to the word clock input of the OctoPre and an optical cable from the OctoPre ADAT out to the Clarett ADAT in. Within minutes, I had system capable of 16 analog inputs. As the title states, I used 16 microphones for this track and had a blast doing it. It doesn't mean I will use all of them, but I would much rather record something and not need it than to need it and not have recorded it. So this begs the question, "what did he use all 16 inputs on???" I put a microphone on the top and bottom of every drum (snare, toms) and one on the beater side of the kick and one at the resonant head of the kick catching the low end. I also used a crotch mic, two overheads two room mics and a glue mic (kind of as a third overhead). I had to do lots of measuring and phase flipping to make sure that I had little to no phase cancellation. First, we'll listen to the eight microphones going into my external pres which I ran into the Clarett line inputs for conversion: With the addition of the other eight microphones, here was the result: Now I have a much fuller sound and a lot of options to make it sound however I want. For only being $399.99, this would make a great addition to any home studio. As always, enjoy FAST and FREE shipping on any order in the continental US. If you have and questions or comments, feel free to give us a call at 855-269-0474, or stop in our store in Downtown Appleton! Be sure to check out our other articles here.