The drummer showed up with mics attached to his kit!

[UstadKhanAli]

http://www.avantelectronics.com/CDMK-7.htm

 

As some of you know, I just did a recording session with Kofi Baker (Ginger Baker's son). He has a Page drum set that, according to him, doesn't require tuning, or at the very least, has keyless tuning, and his two kick drums are pre-mounted with Avantones mics. Very convenient. Except for overheads and room mics, he can clip the rest of his mics on to the rims of his toms and snare and be ready to go almost instantly.

 

I just noticed that his shining endorsement is on the link above

I ended up going with my Heil PR30s for his toms because he had one clip-on mic for each of his five toms, so I shared two toms with each Heil mic instead, but I did use his clip-on mic for the floor tom, which sounded good. Ended up using the two pre-mounted kick drum mics, the snare, and the floor tom. Very convenient, and the sound was quite good. I used my Lawson L251 as an overhead.

 

Has anyone else used this? Does anyone else use cliip-on mics (drum rim mic mounts)?

 

[Lee Knight]

I recorded a drummer who brought some Sennheiser 604s. The tom clip on mics. I was skeptical cause... I don't know, it seems you'd get a lot of contact transmission of an undesirable sort.

 

They sounded just great. Not a problem at all with the clip on option. At least in the case with the 604s.

 

That is a nice looking kit.How did the keyless tuning work out? Did it sound good?

[UstadKhanAli]

 

I recorded a drummer who brought some Sennheiser 604s. The tom clip on mics. I was skeptical cause... I don't know, it seems you'd get a lot of contact transmission of an undesirable sort.

 

 

I was a little concerned about this too, but nothing. It was clean as anything.

 

 

They sounded just great. Not a problem at all with the clip on option. At least in the case with the 604s. That is a nice looking kit.How did the keyless tuning work out? Did it sound good?

 

 

Well, this may sound stupid, but I'm not sure how the thing works. Kofi said that it didn't require tuning, and the band, who have been playing with him a while now, said that he doesn't need to tune his drums also. And sure enough, he never adjusted the tuning of it. It's completely keyless, with cables criss-crossing the exterior of each of the drums (if you look really carefully, you can see this in my photo; you can also see the silver Avantone drum kit case on the floor). One turn tunes the bottom and top head apparently.

 

I did find this discussion about Page drums on a forum:

http://www.sputnikmusic.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-496681.html

 

Oh, and yes, the mics sounded good. Really good. It's so weird to simply connect an XLR cable to a bunch of mics that are already clipped on and be ready to go. I connected four of his mics instantly, then just added the overhead and the two tom mics and was ready to go in minutes. Very strange. Instant modern close-miced drum sound.

[Ronan Murphy]

A couple of the times I have worked with Terry Bozzio, we ended up suing some of his clip on/pre mount options from his live kit, just for the logistics of placing mics with his huge kit. We got some good results but not really better than I could have gotten with traditional mic (if the trad. miking had actually fit)

[UstadKhanAli]

Yeah, that's kinda what I thought about this as well, Ronan. Kofi had a huge kit, and if I had bothered to mic it the way he had it plus room and overhead mics, I would have literally used up every single one of my mic stands...assuming that I could have packed them all in there in the first place.

 

This, OTOH, was convenient. And it sounded good. About as good as it would have sounded if I had been able to mic up everything myself. But it went up in seconds. The kick drum mics were already mounted inside the kick drums. Very fast, very convenient. And good sounding. Because of the mounts, I literally had a drum sound in about ten minutes (not including the time that it took for me to baffle everything).