Cahonga: A New and Great Sounding Piece of Furniture

Well today he had a fun day at rehearsal. Ben had his "new" 1978 Guild bass which was awesome, but the big news was the Cahonga. This is the latest percussion item built by Marc, our resident percussionist and brilliant cabinet maker. How does it sound? You ask. Awesome. It has a great tone. Smooth middle, punchy lows, and a nice snap when needed. I can't wait for Marc to put the finish on this fine piece of musical furniture. How did we mic it? Two Beta 56's on the top and an Audix D-4 under to add some bottom when needed. I can't wait to fire it up again on Sunday.

Drum Microphones We use at DSC

In an effort to post more regularly I will be posting some equipment we use and why it was chosen. I will start with microphones.

Shure SM/Beta 91- Kick drum, inside. I use this to get the beater attack from the kick drum. It can be used alone, like in the Youth room but I like in combo with another microphone.

Shure Beta 52- Kick drum, Outside. I use this to get more of the bottom of the kick drum. I insert just in side the hole of the resonating head.

Shure SM57- Snare drum. This is the industry standard for so many instruments. I like it on the snare nothing ground breaking just good snare reproduction. Also good for guitar amps, congas, and toms etc....

Shure KSM109- I have started using one of these on hi-hat since I started using my SM81's as crowd mics. I made the switch because of the live CD. Shure replaced this microphone with the SM137.

Audix Micro D- Toms. What can you say about these microphones. They are small and sound great on toms. On the recording we just we used Sennheiser MD421's which some day we might get to replace the micro D.

Audix D4- Thunder Tom. I use the D4 on our giant floor tom. It just gives me more bottom or thunder if you will. I really like the D6 for this as well.

Shure KSM32- Overheads. I love these microphones. They really pick up the subtle cymbal fluff and sound great when the kit is being pounded on. I also really like these on Electric Guitar amps.

Other Microphones I use from time to time are:

Shure SM81- Overheads/HiHat. Just a standard and sound great.

Shure Beta 57- Snare/Snare bottom

Shure Beta 56a- Toms/snare. I use these on percussion like congas.

Shure Beta 98- Toms. I use these mostly for Djembe.

Audio Technica Pro 35- I use these on toms in the youth room. They are also great on percussion, strings, and even micing cymbals.

Shure PG81- Overheads/HiHats. This is there budget overhead mic

Shure PG56- Toms in the youth room. Budget tom mic.

Audio Technica ATM35- Kick/Tom/DJembe bottom

Audio Techica Pro 25- Same as above just budget version.

Sennheiser e914- Overheads/Hihat. I use these as Choir mics but also work as overhead.

Well there you have it. The microphones I use on drums. I will look at the percussion microphones in the next post.

Drums at DSC

Well after a great training session which focused mostly on set up of the drums. I am pleased to announce that the drum rack is finished. The big change from the training is that the drum subsnake is attached to the rack. This means the subsnake just rolls out with the rack. This also means that the inputs from the firebox for zach's tracks are always plugged in. I also attached the cat 5 cables for the aviom setup. Now just plug the snake into floor box and plug in control unit to cat 5 cable on drum side of rack and you are ready to go. So to put it simply, the only things you have to plug into the rack are, the power, the subnake to the floor box, input for buttkicker, and buttkicker cables to the shakers. It has made it a quick set for me the last two weeks. I will post pictures tomorrow and hopefully a video sometime before Christmas, though I doubt it with the wave of crazy coming around here. check back or more.