In the home studio with legendary drummer Mike Portnoy

And also the DTP 640 REX, I like to have a condenser and a dynamic capsule in one housing. And the fact that they’re phase-aligned is really useful. So it is one of those two, but maybe I’ll come back to you in a few weeks and let you know if anything changed. I have not used the LCT 140 AIR yet, with the two modes AIR and CLEAR - this one sounds also very interesting to me.  
 

[LEWITT] Let’s talk a little bit about the recording chain and how you capture the performances of a legendary drummer like Mike Portnoy. Let’s start with the drum kit’s Mike is using...

[Thomas Cucé] His main kit that he uses for most very technical, difficult sections and all his super progressive elements, is the Avenged Sevenfold kit. It has 15 different cymbals – obviously, you can get all different kinds of tones out of it. It consists of 2x kick drums, 1x snare, 2 x hihats, 6x toms, 4x octobans, 1x big gong drum, 3x overheads. 

Then he has a smaller kit, which is a clone of the Ringo Star kit. It is much more condensed, small, and has only two or three cymbals. He uses it for his subtle groove sections. So if you’ve seen the song Mike Portnoy posted recently on his YouTube channel you can listen to that kit - and we’ve used all the LEWITT mics on it.  

Listen to the Ringo kit: Mike Portnoy - I Wanna Stay Home (featuring Melody Portnoy, Roger Joseph Manning Jr & Jason Falkner) 

[LEWITT] You’ve mentioned the two kick drums: is there an upside/downside between using a double pedal on a single kick and using two separate kick drums? Besides using a lot of space, does it make your job easier or harder if there are two? 

[Thomas Cucé] For the sake of simplicity I would say double kick pedal all the way. Two kick drums complicate things. You have to worry about several things. For example, when editing it, it presents kind of phase issues of the kick drum resonance and stuff like that. But the main thing is that you have to take care of the tuning of each kick drum.  

I’ve actually learned a lot from Jerry Guidroz - he has engineered about 25 albums of Mike. Jerry talks about kick drum tuning a lot and if you tune it slightly differently, the listener won’t really hear it, but that’s how you get a slightly different interesting sound, you’ll notice. It only comes out when you play double base with two kick drums. It’s cool in terms of resonances, but it does complicate things when it comes to editing.  
 

[LEWITT] You’ve mentioned phase issues, at what point are you looking into the phase relationship between the signals? Is there always time for checking on that or do you time-align the signals later in your DAW? 

[Thomas Cucé] The positions where I could think phases can be a problem are the snare drum mics. All the other positions are mainly aligned pretty well. I usually check after the fact.

In sessions where we’re switching kits, we don’t spend a huge amount of time checking on everything. With everything being so easy to be aligned after the fact you kind of get lazy. Whenever I’m setting up the snare I’m using my two fingers and measure from the source and make sure the top and button snare mics are using the same distance. So I’m trying to align them by keeping the same distance and I’m trying to minimize the phase problems I’ll face after the fact that way.  
 

[LEWITT] What’s your general approach when it comes to recording drums? 

[Thomas Cucé] It definitely depends on the project – the last project I’ve mixed was a 70’s retro cover song that needed much more overhead to achieve that kind of sound whereas when you crashing hard on cymbals your overhead mics capturing more of the cymbals because you’re hitting so hard that the snare sound is not so much getting through on the cymbal mics. It still depends on the project, but it is mainly close mics for most of the stuff he does.  

[LEWITT] Do you have something like your go-to overhead micing technique? 

[Thomas Cucé] Like I said, with Mike’s Avenged Sevenfold kit you have so many different cymbals. When you have so many cymbals it can be a struggle trying to record them all and to retain the stereo image that puts you into the drummers' perspective where you can hear all the cymbals. That comes down during the mixing aspect - which I’m not always doing btw. I’ve been doing the mixing for all of his home projects at the moment, but the high profile projects are going to the high profile mixers. I record everything dry since I don’t know where it is going and the mixing engineer of the project has to be able to make it fit wherever it is needed.  
 

[LEWITT] Do you use any unusual mic techniques on the drums or do you like to experiment with positioning?  

[Thomas Cucé] Again, this depends on what the project needs, and I rarely ever do the same thing the same way. Plus if I’m not mixing it, it also depends on what the mixing engineer wants. A few weeks ago we did a more a Beatles kind of song and they’ve used a mic that’s almost like an overhead: a single mono mic behind the head of the drummer – I've tried that out. But most of the time I’m using close mics.  

About Thomas Cucé 

Thomas Cucé is an audio engineer and musician with over 8 years of experience in the music industry. He created Evergreen Recording Studio in 2016 when he recorded his band, Next To None's sophomore album, Phases.  

Thomas has recorded with prominent artists such as Mike Portnoy, David Ellefson, Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal, Alex Skolnick, and Derek Sherinian. He has also teched in the U.S. and Europe for the progressive metal band, Haken.