I went to a gig the other night and watched this cover band play. They were doing an open mic jam thing, brought their own little PA. The drummer had a sennheiser 421 on his bass, an sm 57 on his snare and 2 others on his toms, and 3 shure sm 81's, 2 overhead and one on his hat. But his kit was a beat up 30 year old Premier P.O.S., looked like it was dropped off the back of his pickup, missing all of the resonant heads and the batter heads were old coated heads that looked like they were the factory heads that came with the kit. Thing was plastered over all drums with like a thousand bumper stickers. For real. Close to 2 large for all those mics and he's mic'ing a kit that sounded like hell. He would have been much better off buying a 2000 dollar kit and using a 200 dollar drum mic kit than using a 2000 dollar mic kit to mic a 200 dollar drum kit. The point of this story is, i have over 13k invested in my kit and yet i use 2 nady dmk-7 mic kits, 14 mics in total. My cost for all of those mics? about $250. FOR ALL 14 OF THEM. Don't get hung up on "better" microphones, guys, we're drummers, not engineers (at least most of us aren't studio engineers). Buy better drum gear and let the pros worry about microphones. Even for recording at home, that $300 production program (pro-tools/ cubase/ cakewalk, et al) and interface will make your drumkit and that $125 dollar set of mics sound like a million bucks.
