It's hard to beat a ribbon mic for drums. The hi hat is the biggest obstacle when dealing with condensers and dynamics. A ribbon will happily "miss" the top or beginning of the odd harmonic transient a hi hat or cymbal presents. So, if I am planning on compressing a mono picture of a complicated thing like a drum kit, a ribbon mic is my friend.

The trade off is the lack of top end response and not as quick detail. We mustn't forget the power of component matching though. If we have a 414 hooked up to a transistor preamp, we got a hot mess. Plug the same mic into a transformer preamp, we have a party. This particular Royer 121 mic LOVES the Ampex 351 preamp. The two go together like hot pie and my mouth.

Today I was trying to get an explosive room sound with a pair of beyer 160's and the Trident. Combined with close mics through the Langevin. It sounded pretty great, but not chunky enough.

I included the mono royer through the ampex and I got exactly what I was looking for.