Recommended: E/V N/D468 on snare drum (top)

[mhschmieder]

I have a new Gold Standard for miking the top of snare drum, after many experimentations this past weekend with recent mic purchases.

For several years, I have used the Beyerdynamic M201TG, which captures the snap better than any other mic I have tried (and that's a long list).

What I like about the E/V N/D468 is that it adds more detail without giving up the snap, picks up a bit of the wire sound so that you're OK if you run out of channels and can't mic the bottom of the snare, and maintains a usable balance of all of the elements of the snare sound out of the box without requiring any "fix it in the mix" tricks.

I bought this mic to try out on a number of applications, including saxophone and floor tom. On floor tom is still does not replace the discontinued ATM25 (I'm using the heavily revised ATM250 on rack toms), which I still feel has the best balance of depth and detail vs. resonance.

In both applications (as well as bottom snare, for which the Sennheiser e906 guitar amp mic still gives me the most balanced and usable results), I find this E/V mic to be somewhere between a typical dynamic mic and a small diaphragm condenser mic in its timbre, detail, ability to capture transients, and rejection of boominess.

Like many mics that are initially designed for more lucrative markets such as vocals or kick drum, the E/V N/D468 is not mentioned as a snare drum mic in Electro-Voice's literature. Thus I felt it necessary to bring this application of the mic to people's attention. After all, the Beyerdynamic M201TG wasn't designed as a snare drum mic either, but over the years fell into that designation by many pros.