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[Steve Alves]

How many of you are using delay on your drum mics to house?

[Thomas Harkin]

How many of you are using delay on your drum mics to house?

Never heard of delaying the drum mics.  Once, I delayed the house speakers to "line up" to the sound of the acoustic drums coming off the stage.

It "sort of" worked.  There were places in the room that didn't "line up"!

Your milage may vary.

[Steve Alves]

Never heard of delaying the drum mics.  Once, I delayed the house speakers to "line up" to the sound of the acoustic drums coming off the stage.

It "sort of" worked.  There were places in the room that didn't "line up"!

Your milage may vary.

I have never done it either but was told it will really clean up the drum sound?? Rock band with regular single bass drum. Kit sits 10' back from front of stage. I calculate that to be only 740 Microseconds. I can't believe the result will be worth the effort.

[Tim Perry]

I have never done it either but was told it will really clean up the drum sound?? Rock band with regular single bass drum. Kit sits 10' back from front of stage. I calculate that to be only 740 Microseconds. I can't believe the result will be worth the effort.

.88  milisec per foot.  (some round this off to 1 mS foot.)

[Nicolas Poisson]

Never heard of delaying the drum mics.  Once, I delayed the house speakers to "line up" to the sound of the acoustic drums coming off the stage.

It "sort of" worked.  There were places in the room that didn't "line up"!

Your milage may vary.

I guess it mainly depends on how many delays you have. On some early digital console, you could only delay outputs (busses). So you could only delay the FoH. A good strategy was to line it up with the loudest instrument on stage, often the kick drum. On newer consoles you often have input delays, so you can line up every single channel with its real location on stage. The drawback is this delay will also be present in all the auxes, which will be a real problem if it reaches 20-30ms (20-30ft) and foldback are done from the FoH console.

On the other hand, delaying channels to match the real location (or, more technically, so that acoustic and reinforced waves phase do match) is more important in small venues, where acoustic sound is a great part of overall sound. So the places where you want delay are also the places where you need short delay.

What I do:
- I put some delay on the FoH bus to line it up with instruments at stage front. This delay will not affect any aux so no problem with foldback.
- I put additional delay on loud instrument that are located upstage, but no more than 10ms. This allows to compensate for 10ft from stage front instruments - a reasonable distance for small venues. I put the delay according to a "visual" estimation of the distance.
- I put no delay on instruments that have almost no direct contribution to the overall sound (folk Guitars, vocals, keyboards...)

Keep in mind that the ideal delay varies depending on where you find yourself in the house. Also keep in mind that digital consoles and speaker processors add a short delay anyway.

My small experience tells me that the benefit of input delays mainly concerns instruments with strong low end (kick, bass amp or double bass). The phase reverse switch can be very useful too.

I guess there could be benefit to set delays according to mic distance from each other, as for snare top and bottom, instead of FoH, but I did not tried this untill now.

[TJ (Tom) Cornish]

How many of you are using delay on your drum mics to house?

Is your drum kit in front of your main speakers?  If not, any delay you apply to the kit will work against you, as the drums are already "behind" the PA, and your delay would need to be negative time.  Many people delay the mains back to the loudest thing on stage - often the drum kit, to better time align things.

[Nicolas Poisson]

Is your drum kit in front of your main speakers?  If not, any delay you apply to the kit will work against you, as the drums are already "behind" the PA, and your delay would need to be negative time.  Many people delay the mains back to the loudest thing on stage - often the drum kit, to better time align things.

Tom, I do not get this. If the PA is closer to the audience than the drum, the sound will be heard sooner. So if you delay the FoH, you can hope both acoustic and reinforced sound to arrive on time at the listeners ears. As I said, time difference depends on where you are in the house so this is not perfect.

Or did I miss something ?

[TJ (Tom) Cornish]

Tom, I do not get this. If the PA is closer to the audience than the drum, the sound will be heard sooner. So if you delay the FoH, you can hope both acoustic and reinforced sound to arrive on time at the listeners ears. As I said, time difference depends on where you are in the house so this is not perfect.

Or did I miss something ?

Sorry - not enough caffiene this morning.  You're correct.  Delay can be applied to drum mics to improve the situation.  This is often done on the FOH send instead of on individual inputs, which is where my mind went.  Carry on.

[Samuel Rees]

For small shows where stage sound and FOH sound play together a lot, channel delay can be quite helpful. If there is a big space between the front line of stage and FOH I'll use bus delay as suggested, and also similarly I'll delay certain loud inputs back to their position.

[David Jameson]

Ran into this one time.  B National act wanted the subs delayed to the kick drum.  He said he could feel the kick twice through the floor.

Thanks and good luck.