From my insignificant experience as an amateur recording engineer, drums can be effectively mic'd with as few as one or two mics or as many as twenty. A bare-bo

From my insignificant experience as an amateur recording engineer, drums can be effectively mic'd with as few as one or two mics or as many as twenty. A bare-bones rock recording setup might have a single overhead condenser mic capturing the cymbals and shell drums (snare and toms) and a dynamic mic pointed at the outer head of the kick drum. Regarding the choice of microphone, condenser mics have better sensitivity and fidelity at high frequencies (cymbals produce harmonics that extend well past the upper limit of human hearing); dynamic mics perform better at high amplitude. A four-mic setup will have two overhead mics for stereo imaging and another dynamic mic on the snare drum; I would consider this the minimum for achieving a professional sound. Most mics introduced after this point will be additional spot mics like those already on the kick and snare drums; most drum sets will have two or more tom drums which benefit from a close-mic, and it is very common to mic the bottom head of the snare drum, against which the wires rattle, to combine with the more percussive sound of the top head. My personal experience (and amount of equipment) runs out at this point; but one might add additional overhead microphones, or place microphones elsewhere in the room to capture more of the natural ambiance. A maximally-mic'd up drum set might have clip-on mics on the top and bottom of every shell drum (including the kick), two or three distinct models and placements of microphone on the snare, and spot mics for groups or even individual cymbals in addition to the overheads. Regardless of the number of mics, the overhead microphones provide the foundational sound, and the spot mics sweeten the result. A comprehensive description of drum mixing goes beyond the scope of this comment, and for that matter I can only speak of how I mix drums for rock music. I would begin with compressing the feed from the overheads to bring forward the cymbals and the ringing of the snare, and then add punch from the spot mics. It's generally impossible to completely eliminate bleed between microphones, but isolation can be achieved in effect by gating the feed - muting the signal from a spot mic when it falls below a certain threshold. This way you can, say, run the feed from the snare through your favorite distortion effect without also amplifying the bleed from the cymbals that lies between them.