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Old 04-09-2012, 12:44 AM   #22
ares
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Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Chapel Hill, NC
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vinnie's Ice Cream View Post
I've never heard or seen close micing with condensers on drums in modern recording. Like Damo said, the SPL would blow them away... that's a real fast way to learn a real simple lesson about mics.

Condensers are for condensing lots of sound. Dynamic mics are for direct sound sources.
This is totally incorrect. There are tons of condenser mics that are designed to be used for close micing drums:

Shure Beta 91 (goes inside kick drum)
Shure Beta 98 (toms)
Sennheiser e901 (goes inside kick drum)
there are a bunch of others that are for similar applications that I can't think of right now.

I've even seen the FOH engineer for a well-known band use Shure KSM32's on close-mic'd toms!

The difference between condenser and dynamic mics is the kind of transducer element that they use. Dynamics use an inductor while condensers use a capacitor. Since the moving element of a condenser has less mass, they are often better at picking up transients and are more sensitive. They generally have wider pickup patterns and therefore make better overhead-type mics, which is probably what you mean by saying that they 'condense' the sound.
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