I don't know how many times I've put up large diaphragm condenser mics as overheads and the drummer has asked me ?Are you using vocal mics for overheads??. I usually reply, ?It's a condenser mic. I'll put it on whatever I want to? in a nice tone. I'm tired of being nice. It's not the drummer's fault that he doesn't know everything about recording. It's the idiot marketing that causes this misconception. So let's shoot it down.

A microphone is a device that detects changes in air pressure and converts this to a small amount of electricity. That's it. Every mic has it's own sound and that sound may be more ideal for a given situation more than others. However, there is no reason why you couldn't take out the tom mics from your fancy drum microphone package and use it as a vocal mic. I'm not saying that it will be the best choice, but it has just as good of chance as any other mic. You'll never know until you try.

The notion that a mic is a ?vocal mic? makes one think that maybe the mic has a magical power that allows it to reject all sound by vocals as if it has some sort of retina scan security feature. ?I'm afraid that you are a cymbal sound. We are afraid that we can not let you pass through this microphone?.

People try to claim that dynamics are only good for brutish / dumb sounds like electric guitars or toms, but condensers are for smarter sounds such as cymbals and vocals. Well guess what! There are no rules. I just read about BT in EQ magazine (that's a lot of acronyms..reminds me of Good Morning Vietnam). Anyway, BT has done numerous cds that sort of combine rock, pop, and techno into a package that sort of creates it's own genre. You can hear is work on all the fast car movie soundtracks and scores. He was talking about a friend of his using SM 57s on the entire drum kit including drum overheads. He said it was the most hifi sounding drum kit he had ever heard. Note: This won't always work...nothing ever works twice.

In closing, just make sure that you don't limit yourself because someone calls a mic a condenser mic. Recording engineers think in terms of frequencies and such. So a thick sounding mic works well on thin sounding sources regardless of whether it's a guitar, a vocal, or a saxaphone.

Brandon