Time align drum mics? || Live Sound Phase Issues 

Love it! When the band is comfortable and the mix is sounding good, some audio engineers will play a game on their phone. Great sound engineers will do these kinds of things. The mix isn't complete until the gig is over

For mixing I use a plug-in called AutoAlign by Sound Radix. It measures the delay and polarity for you similarly to InPhase but it does it for you automatically which is a huge time saver over InPhase.

Another eye opening video. I'm not likely smart enough to do what you've just done, but it was cool to hear the difference. I also loved how hot your kick input gain is. I always have mine lower, but if you're not afraid, neither am I.

In a live situation time aligning the kit with the PA gives very obvious results as well. There is significant spill from the kit in the vocal mics that are nearer so you have to choose whether to align the drums with the vocal mics or the PA since those are different distances. Or switch to electronic drums and kill the stage noise. 🙂

The Waves InPhase is definitely on my wish list. The graphic content alone is going to be very helpful to align my audio. WYHIWYG...what others hear should be good. 🙂☕

I used Melda's AutoAlign and it works perfectly. 😎

Game changer! This is great stuff🔥💪

The difference is clear. It sounds so much more open/3D/full bodied when they are aligned

Crushed the link and purchased my fellow Nerd!

I’ve always put _some_ effort into aligning the snare top & bottom, as well as the kick in mic (if I’m using it for anything other than keying the kick out mic’s gate), and this will probably get me to try it on the rest of the kit, too.

Soooo, you said that metric makes measuring easier for this… What about Cubits? I always delay the kick in mic, if I don’t have in-phase for that event, I’ll just do input delay. I once time aligned a guitar channel to the rest of the channels by listening to the snare attack in the guitar mic and the snare channel. It was pretty easy to get within 1ms doing that.

Great video! For live, I think polarity switch goes a long way. I do always delay Kick in and Kick out. For studio, I think time alignment is perhaps more feasible plus you have those visual cues. I do think live having playback can help with this quite a bit. If your kit and mic position are the same week to week you could probably get very close to the same studio level accuracy. I guess I just got a reason to setup playback. 😂

Just tried doing this with the snare on Sunday. The sometimes worship leader/preacher/drummer said he loved it, but the active drummer noticed the latency in his ears. I'll be working on either double patching for ears or seeing if we can tap the ears pre-delay.

Nice video. I already delay the snare mics. I haven't try to delay the toms yet. I will try this and see how well they sound. Also you might want to experiment with a sonic maximizer on the toms send to their own subgroup then blend them with the drums subgroup. You will get punch for ever on the toms and will fell the impact. I promise lol. Take care James Thanks for everything.

How are you measuring the sample distance is there a quick key that shows the distance when you highlight the gap differences

I am struggling with this technique. I guess I am too much of an engineer to see the benefit. I can definitely see you can increase your kick by aligning all the tom mics to it, but are you not making the timing between the toms worse and increasing the comb filtering effect in the toms? I would also be interested to see how often you have to do the alignment. As you said, sound travels at different speeds depending on a wide range of conditions. If it is great today, will it be terrible tomorrow? Or, will the drift be small enough that you will need to recalibrate the mics once every 3 months or so? Inquiring minds want to know.

Your vids are killer!

Hello from Australia, i am a volunteer at a community radio station, I've been interested in audio production for a long time, mostly in my home studio. In the past year or so i have been involved in broadcasting local bands live on the radio and trying to mix in real time for broadcast with analogue gear. I also multitrack record as much as i can and have discovered the whole phase alignment thing. So . . . It crossed my mind that i could just do monitor mixes analogue and do the broadcast mix in the box. Reaper has a plug called phase rotation, i figure its doing time alignment. But could a given mic (thats waveform is inverted raw vs another mic) require both phase invert and time alignment . . . aswell.

Interesting video.

why would you correct for an apparent timing delay between the two OH mics by using the snare? It's not as though the drummer is putting their snare dead-center of the kit, balanced on top of the kick. Wouldn't you just want to align the snare to the louder and earlier transient of the OH mics and then let physics do the rest? The panning of the OHs should feel more natural if signals panned to one side reach the listener's ear faster on the side on which they are louder.

With our drummer I have to align to the speed of smell. Love your videos! Always helpful!

Sound radix auto align does this automatically. put it on every drum channel and then detect one channel to the next.

This is a secret that the pro's don't usually share.Thanks.

Great video. For live, us X32 guys are at a limit to what we can do other than route through a DAW and do alignment and then back out (to livestream or other). I don't think I would ever go through a DAW back to the PA. Waves Superrack? Sure. Would love to see what we can do other than 1ms stepped delays on the X32. Moving mics by inches and feet can be done for some degree of adjustment. What kind of delays would be available in say a Digicom or Avid style costy-mixer?

I hope to do this someday. I love helping out with sound

What about lining up video and audio?

There was one time. And only once that I got to pay drums instead of mix audio. Had a guy mention the kick drum. Basically hummed it. Just want you to know I've accomplished the impossible