Best tom mics for minimal bleed/off axis leakage.

It's probably time for a change in your thinking about drum micing. Any mic with sufficiently minimal off axis leakage (if such a mic even exists) is going to sound funny when close micing a drum because it won't pick up much of anything beyond the tiny spot on the head it's aimed at. And frankly I don't believe such a mic exists - you're still going to get leakage becauser proximity to other high decibel sources is too close. And mics with very tight patterns usually have highly colored off axis pickup.

If you're looking for a more natural drum sound you don't want to close mic. You want to use mics with a normal cardioid pattern an d good off axis response at a distance of a couple of feet from the kit.

First thing you have to change is your thinking about the kit itself. A drum kit is an single instrument, not a collection of disparate sources. Leakage is your friend, not your enemy. As such, it needs to be picked up by a simple, but well thought out array of mics, working together synergisticly. There are a couple of approaches to doing this. One is a pair of overheads with a kick mic. The other, which is the one I favor,  is a front of kit, a side (FT) of kit, a snare, and a kick. If you have the mics and want to get fancy you can use a kick (in) mic and a  kick (out) mic at a distance of about 2 feet with a tunnel to prevent leakage. You can also add either stereo or mono room mics at a distance of several feet. Front and side of kit mics should be good quality cardioid LDCs. I use  Pearlman TM-1s, one about 1.5-2 feet from the racks (front-of-kit) and the other the same distance from the floor. both are between 6" and 1.5' above the top rims of their respective tome, adjusted by ear for balance with the cymbals. the two mics should be roughly the same distance from the snare, but you don't need to be anal about it. If it sounds good, it is good. I only use a single kick mic (space considerations, plus I don't have the second mic I'd want to use), which is either an EV RE-20 (NOT one of their cheaper look alikes). A reissue U-47 FET would be better, but I don't own one. Alternately, I use an AKG D12 (NOT a D112, which is an horrible excuse for a microphone). That would be my preferred mic on many kits other than my house kit. Another good alternate is the Beyer M-88 but I don't use mine for that  as it's my vocal mic for live performance. Snare mic is a bit odd in my placement. I currently use a Neumann KM84 ( DO NOT cheap out with a 184, they sound like crap.) Placement is up to you, but I have found that optimum placement is on the SIDE  of the drum about 2" away, give or take a smidge, off-axis from the soundhole by 1-3 inches, and height adjusted by ear for a balance between top an bottom heads. Yeah, it's weird, but try it, you'll be amazed. You can get a better, more natural sound than any two mic combo and ther are zero phase problems. The drum sounds like the drum. (Yeah, I didn't believe it either at first, but try it.) Before I got the 84 is was getting acceptable results with an AKG C451EB ( NOT the new piece of crap, the old, modular one), but the 84's unparalleled off axis response allows a very natural sounding and (with proper placement, which ain't hard) pickup of the hi-hat, in balance and with great tone. For a room mic I use a U87, which is OK but less than ideal - but I do not presently own a pair of Coles 4058s.

My current setup is based on a variant of the Glyn Johns method developed by William Wittman aka "Weedy Wet" , who had a thread dedicated to it on the now defunct Womb Forums. There's an internet archive of it if you know how to use that, but I believe the photos are gone....

Thank you for your reply, John. No matter how presumptuous parts of it was

But it did not address what I asked. What mics have you found to have little off axis leakage? In those rare cases where you'd want separation?


To prevent further misunderstanding with you, John, here's my current drum mic'ing setup (as long as the drummer can deal with it):

Recordeman setup OHs: Coles 4038 (32" above the snare and from snare to over right the shoulder. Also equidistant from the kick in both places)

Kick: U47 FET + Beta 91 inside (no hole in the front head)

Snare: Top:Beyerdynamic M201 / Bottom: Beta 57

Toms: MD421s

Ambient: Mono Royer 121 (no place for spaced pair at the moment)

As with everything; it all depends on the band/sound wanted/the musician. But lately, this has been a perfect fit for the recordings I've done. Now, if I could only find a better tom mic...

John does seem to suffer from the common ailment of Mistaking His Subjective Opinions For Established Fact.

I mean, I get a chuckle out of your posts, John, but you couldn’t do a better job of playing the Scolding Old Codger if you were auditioning for the role like your life depended on it.

Another +1 for the ATM25. And I also use the CAD M179’s in hypercardiod I believe. With the right placement they do quite well with rejection

M179's give a lot of options with the continuous variable polar patterns.

yeah - if I get a basher in here, then I would probably use my ATM25’s. Otherwise the M179 is getting me the best toms sounds I’ve ever gotten. Used to use KSM32’s and 44’s on toms. And ATM25’s - But the Cad M179’s Sound better here on my kit as long as the bleed isn’t a big issue

I'd like to test drive the Lewitt, Sennheiser MKH 800 Twin, Pearl TL 44, and Pearl ELM-A.   All dual output mics that let you pick pattern later.....etc....

yeah - diddo - I only use them on toms... nothing else

The majority of kits I've done have been more like your silver kit.

Since I do more younger/new bands I typically run into less experienced drummers who cluster their kit very tightly and use brighter cymbals and have a hard time adapting to increasing the spacing between their cymbals and drums, so I end up having a lot of trouble with bleed.

Pretty sure silver kit guy went to Berklee! (He's a great drummer, just couldn't resist).

Well, his question as I read it was about a mic with a very tight pickup pattern and uncolored off axis response. As far as I know such a mic does not exist and probably can't for engineering reasons. (If I'm incorrect on this perhaps one of our resident mic engineers can enlighten me - I'm always interested in learning from experts.) The mics with the most "perfect" off axis response are omnis, which are the opposite of a narrow pattern, there are very, very few cardioids with uncolored off-axis response, notably the Neumann KM84. Most cardioids, however, have off axis response that varies from their on axis pickup, and the tighter the pattern of the mic the greater the variation. Therefore, if he wants good off axis response, he probably isn't going to find it in a hypercardioid, supercardioid, or shotgun microphone. Furthermore, the tighter the pickup pattern the less of the head the mic "sees" when close, which results in tone that is less natural.

I don't think my posts are really negative at all - elitist perhaps, but not negative. I've been a microphone freak for a long, long time - since high school. For the greatest amount of that time I could never figure out why recorded drums never sounded the way I expected them to, but I lived with it, more or less, while wondering what the hell I was doing wrong. Then about 8 years ago, give or take, I encountered William Wittman, who is somewhat outspoken in his views concerning microphones, and in particular drum micing techniques and microphone quality. I started paying attention to what he was saying and surprise!, surprise! (to quote Gomer Pyle) his technique works better than any of the many other approaches I'd used over the years. And it's easy, relatively noncritical concerning placement, and eliminates most of the problems common to many other approaches.

If I appear critical of some microphones it's because over the years I've spent a lot of money on mics that I probably shouldn't have because it turns out that those mics were causing a lot of problems I was attributing to other causes. A lot of those were mics that are popular to the point of having become "standards". I also quit paying much attention to most (commercial) reviews, shootouts, videos, etc, because paying attention to those in the past were at best not usually helpful and at worst cost me money I shouldn't have spent. I'll admit that telling people that the mics they've spent money on (and when you spend money on something you're never very receptive to critical comments) is not the way to make one's self popular but I've never been good at popularity contests anyway and really, somebody does have to do it, if only to counterbalance all the BS in common circulation.

As fare as hearing some of my stuff is concerned I'd be more than happy to post a few cuts off the album I have coming out soon, if I knew how to post music files on this site (Advice please? I've actually been wanting to post some stuff here for some time now.). It's more or less '60s-'70s style  honkytonk country with a bit of other stuff thrown in. However the approach works on a wide variety of musical styles. If you want to get an idea of what the technique can do I'd recommend listening to a sampling of William's discography - that's the target I'm aiming for.