I also find myself reversing polarity on overheads a lot of the time when referencing them to the snare. Last time involved a Sm57 on the snare and a couple of Neumanns as OH´s.
On the subject of "what to hear for": when flipping polarity to find the best phase between OHs and snare mic, I often have to choose between having the snare fatten up in one switch position, but losing a bit of sharpness in the attack, or getting a more interesting attack sound, but losing pretty much all weight. I always go for the first option. Is this a normal compromise, or I should be more persistent in finding optimal placement before hitting the phase switch? Do you guys usually end up getting OH positioning that´s just night-and-day better than others, or is it always a compromise?
I usually have the same thing happening on toms / OH relationship (by hitting polarity switch on the tom mics), and sometimes I just like the low frequency-compromised version better, the toms stick out less, but they just sound more interesting, it´s as if they lose that "close mic" quality to them, and sound more real, even if not as fat. I also wonder if that´s a common compromise, or if I´m just not persistent enough in the positioning part of the process (though time is often not available to go anal on these matters).
btw, I always reference the OHs to the snare, finding the best-sounding mic of the rough-positioned OH pair, and having the other measured to be at the exact same distance from the snare (I tend to use A-B positioning), and then I go for the toms.
Also, when double-micing kick drums, I´m in doubt about something: I usually get near-perfect phase when using a "dynamic at the hole + LDC at a distance" combination, which makes for highly enhanced low end, when compared to a single dynamic at the hole. But at the same time, this makes for a somewhat stale, depthless attack, and I´ve been looking to get the kick drum attack sounding more interesting. I notice that in a lot of records I like (be it Albini-style drum recordings or that more produced, Pantera-style metal stuff) it feels as if there´s almost a doubled quality to the attack of the kick drum, as it it´s more than a single transient making for the sonic event. I wonder if anyone else hears it this way, and what have people found to make that sound happen in more interesting ways.
Sometimes it´s hard to know what to hear for when learning recording mostly from reading stuff and listening to records, as opposed to having seasoned pros actually doing things in front of you and getting to experience the nuts-and-bolts in the making. And the time to experiment is not there in a lot of instances, since I don´t own my own gear and I´m working on studio time paid by the band´s (usually scarce) money.
