Will recording acoustic drums blow the internal mic?

Hey everyone,


Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I just wanted to make sure. I have a MacbookPro and wanted to record my drumming for fun with PhotoBooth. I know the sound quality will be better if I mic'd my drums and everything, but I'm not worried about perfect quality at this point. I just wanted to make sure that the loud cymbal crashes and things won't blow out the integrated mic of the Macbook Pro....does anyone know if something like this could happen?

Thanks for the help!

Welcome fellow drummer!

Unlikely to blow it, but make sure it's a fair way from the kit, because you will get dreadful distortion with loud crashes and the like.
A good way to test, would be to get Audacity or Audio Hijack, and enable the level meters. Crash a cymbal and check that the peak isn't maxing out, it's best to have it just into the red at most.
Move the Macbook further way until you get the required level.
Sound quality is going to be very poor btw, the poor mic is really only for voice.

Awesome, thank you for the help! The Audacity thing is a really good idea, I'll give that a shot. And I know the sound quality will be pretty poor, I'm doing it more so to critique my form more than anything so that's not a problem. However, I'm not sure if you record or not, but if I ever did want to record high quality what exactly would I need to do?

thanks again for the help!

I do record, but I have an electronic kit, so things are so much easier! I just plug into line in and I'm away.
For high quality recording your going to need to fully mic your kit and use a midi interface that can record multi channels into Garageband or Logic for example.

I am not a big time recording genius. Only done a few podcast so far so take this with a grain of salt. Here are a few links you might find useful

HOW-TO: Turn your Mac mini into a low-cost recording studio -- Engadget
How to Configure a Recording Studio Rig

Also you might want to go to the iTunes store and search for a podcast called "Inside Home Recording". The information runs the gauntlet from really basic to somewhat more advanced.

Alright cool, thanks for the help guys!