FOH engineer Chris Edrich elevates metal bands' sound with AUDIX mics

Hailing from France and now calling Ireland home, front-of-house audio engineer Chris Edrich mixes for some of the hardest- hitting artists in European metal and its progressive and post genres: Devin Townsend, Leprous, TesseracT, The Ocean, Alcest, Klone, and many others.

Given today’s best backline technology, drums have become the main shaper of the acoustic environment onstage and in the seats.

To optimize this experience for bands and audiences alike, Edrich chooses AUDIX microphones including the DG on kick drum, i5 on snare top with D2 on snare bottom, D4 on toms, SCX1 on hi-hat, SCX25A studio condensers as overheads, and even the ADXG0 boundary mic in an unexpected place.

With most of the bands I work with, drums and vocals are almost the only stage sound. Guitarists, for example, are usually playing through modeling amps such as the Kemper or AxeFX, going straight into the console. So, there’s not a lot to bleed into the drum mics, but it also makes getting a great drum sound that much more important, explains Edrich.

In heavy rock, the foundation of that sound is the all-important kick drum, at which Edrich throws a one-two punch of AUDIX mics — one quite familiar and one less so. “I use the DG outside the kick, but inside the drum I have the ADXG0, which is a boundary microphone”, he says. “It’s very tiny and easy to place, and gives me a nice, bright attack because it’s a condenser. It’s a great complement to the DG, which gives me the big body of the kick”.

Edrich also found an AUDIX mic known for its performance on toms was perfect for a source living just next door. “On the bottom of the snare, I use the D2, which people think of as a tom mic but is in fact great in this application. It has a lot of air but not too much aggressiveness in the high-mids".

For the hi-hat and accents such as splash cymbals, Edrich prefers the SCX1, a compact small-diaphragm condenser. “I used to use the ADX51 for this, which also gave great results”, he notes. “The SCX1 gives me similar results in an impossibly compact form. They’re fantastic”.

Perhaps the biggest surprise yet in Edrich’s kit is his pair of SCX25A — the “lollipop” mic that has built a reputation as a reference-grade studio condenser— which he says is right at home sitting above some of rock’s loudest live drummers.

Everything over 10kHz is crisp without being harsh. It’s a very produced sound I have to do almost no work to get. As far as rejection goes onstage, they’re as good as a condenser can be. I can even compress the SCX25A a little bit, getting virtually no bleed from outside the drums. I realize they’re very well known as piano mics and sometimes used in audiophile reference tests, but they’re my favorite drum overheads ever. I think people should be more aware of them for that, he says.