beyerdynamic Opus 87

I've been playing drums since I was 9 yrs old. My first recordings are of my drumkit using headphones as mics on a old tube taperecorder with reals. My specialism is probably recording drums. If have recorded hours and hours of music (tape-cassette quality) in the 90' with a friend to get through highschool. Then came the 4-track and later the 8-track cassette recorders I used extensively. After that I joined a band and have been in and out a studio on several occasions and observing their techniques. The first thing I knew I had to upgrade were the mics.

Half a year ago I purchased a whole new set up including these Beyer Dynamic Opus 87 for use on the toms. I use a MOTU 828mkII for AD and as a mixing-console and it's connected to my powerbook running MOTU DP 4.12. I listen to Alesis monitor One's (active) for reference and I do some pre-mix work on my way to work in the bus using Beyer Dynamic
DT 770 (wow those headphones totaly spoil you for life !) It looks ridiculous to the commuters but what the hell . . I have a Berigher ADAT-mic pre-amp (ADA8000) that give's me an extra 8-mic chanels and 8 extra line-outs. All this is fit toghter with a headphone amplifier for group-sesion recordings. My main mics are two C1 from StudioProjects.

It is a condenser capsule with a cardioid-pattern. I use it primairely on toms and percussion. It has these very nifty clamps so no need for a seperate mic-stand. The capsule is suspended in a little rubber neck and it does absorb all contact rumble/signals.
I considered a lot af clamp-mics but these were the only condenser-clamp mics I could find then. I was fed-up with dynamic microphone use on my drums trying to approach the sound I heard from my drumseat (accoustically) with a graphic-eq . . I was always missing out on the middle and high.

The first time I heard my toms trough these mics there was no need to adjust anything. I was blown away. I'm a rock/funk drummer but I can totallty see this mic doing it's magic on Jazz-drumsets because it simply captures whet you can hear yourself. Most drum-mic techniques are making a (badly tuned) tom sound like a 90" drum machine. Even to the point where drumheads manufacturers are trying to make heads that sound like those drum-samples from that era out-of-the-box. That way you cannot get anything but this kind of sound. I know of Jazz-musicians that use 1" condenser capsules on their 2 toms and are raving about the results. But I have 4 toms and I did not want to bother with stands. These were indeed the microphones I waited for. If you place them about 2" from the head you don't have a lot of crosstalk from the other drums.

The obvious catch is that you can only uuse them for drums because of that clamp. They have the same capsule as the Opus 53 (I use for my Hihat) so in theory you could use them as overheads as well if it weren't for the clamps.
Sound shortcomings: not for this purpose. (see my Opus 53 review)