Q. Robinson Drums the Heartbeat of ‘Hamilton’ with AUDIX Mics

Hamilton is universally hailed for bringing musical theater to a larger and wider audience than Broadway ever dreamed of. Chronicling the American Revolution in modern song and rap, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda’s history of “America then, as told by America now” won 11 Tony Awards in its initial Broadway run and has since grossed over one billion dollars worldwide. Quinton Robinson holds down the drum throne on the current North American tour. The multi-talented “Q” also records his own music and produces artists, has developed a line of drumsticks, and creates photorealistic stage plots of musical equipment for bands. He relies on AUDIX microphones across all his creative work. For Hamilton, includes the time-tested D6 on kick drum, the compact D2 and D4 on toms, and the i5 dynamic instrument mic on snare. In the studio, he adds an ADX51 small-diaphragm condenser mic on snare bottom and a pair of A131 as overheads. He spoke with AUDIX about his music and microphones from Hamilton’s stop in Denver, Colorado.

“I’ve always enjoyed the quality and consistency of AUDIX mics,” says Robinson. “You know exactly what you’re getting, and I appreciate that with so much to contend with in studio recording and in live performance. The last thing you want to worry about are your microphones, and with AUDIX, I know exactly what I need to dial them in to get the sound I want. AUDIX has been a part of my career now for going on 15 years.”

For the musical goals of Hamilton, that sound could be described as no sound. “The beautiful thing about AUDIX is that you really don’t hear the microphone — you hear what it’s amplifying,” Robinson observes. “With a lot of mics I’ve tried, when I listen to the playback, I really hear their characteristics. Not so with AUDIX. It’s like the mic disappears and gets out of your way. It doesn’t make a drum sound one way or the other.”

At the front-of-house position, this translates into little or no processing of the drum channels. “One of the things I pride myself on is that on Hamilton, there is almost no EQ on the drums,” explains Robinson. “In some theaters, we use maybe a little bass rolloff to avoid rumble on the kick and floor toms, but that’s it. Otherwise, the knobs on the channel strips are straight up and down across the board. That means the mic is picking up exactly what the source is, without any coloration from EQ.”

With Hamilton’s music so rich with hip-hop, R&B, and to some extent rock and pop styles, drum sounds matter, hence the value of the set-it-and-forget-it approach AUDIX makes possible. “Not to minimize any other show, but even though most musicals have rhythm sections, it’s not like getting the perfect drum sound is essential to the story. It is with Hamilton. It matters how I’m playing, and how the front-of-house engineer is mixing the drums. AUDIX mics make all of that easier, so in a very real way they contribute to telling the story. That’s why there are currently seven touring productions of Hamilton, and all of them are on AUDIX.”