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i'm watching this foo fighters live show (fuck off, don't start), and taylor's got a speaker pressed real close to the front head of his kick drum. not a speaker cab, just the speaker itself. were they using it for a mic?

Quite possibly, that's definitely something you can do. People use two different mics for kick drums sometimes, one for the click of the kick beater, and another for the WHOOMPH of the bass drum, those ones often look very different.

There's an item called the "SubKick" which is basically just a speaker you use your bass drum, and I think the main company that makes that one puts them inside a snare drum housing, so it basically just looks retarded in front of your bass drum. I've heard of plenty of people just use the speaker as a microphone, apparently it works well for getting the WHOOMPH as Mike says.

Yamaha marketed them as a SubKick, but you can make your own real easy.
IAN SHANE TYLER of the IAN SHANE TYLER BAND started a thread a while back where he made one.

I mixed some track where a band had used one and didn't really find it extremely useful, but I guess for a large live show where you want some sub-bass frequencies pushing through your huge-as-fuck subs, it would be cool.

McCartney used to use a speaker as a mic for his bass stuff back in teh Beatles days. Old trick but underused. Works great with bass sounds, including kickdrums.

If you're wondering how it works, a speaker normally is a magnet + wire coil attached to the paper cone. As current flows through the coil, it pushes the magnet, pushing the cone, making the sonds.

However, if you do it in reverse, and push the cone, thus pushing the magnet, it will induce current into the coil the same way a microphone does.

same way you can use headphones as a crappy mic in an (extreme) emergency.

PenPen wrote:McCartney used to use a speaker as a mic for his bass stuff back in teh Beatles days. Old trick but underused. Works great with bass sounds, including kickdrums.

ah, i see. we used to use headphones for mics when we were kids. . . i'd just never had seen anybody PRO doing this.

Somebody on instructables has a how to on this, just in case anyone is interested:
http://www.instructables.com/id/SPKR-Mi ... a-speaker/

Thumbs up to goots for posting a great site.

dots wrote:

PenPen wrote:McCartney used to use a speaker as a mic for his bass stuff back in teh Beatles days. Old trick but underused. Works great with bass sounds, including kickdrums.

ah, i see. we used to use headphones for mics when we were kids. . . i'd just never had seen anybody PRO doing this.

Yeah. Again, works best with bass-y stuff, works GREAT for that in fact, but pretty shite for normal use.

actually, this is exactly what our sound engineer is doing. its a very simple way of capturing a very full bass sound from the kick drum

this totally opens up my eyes.
years ago , i forget what my setup was but basically i realized that when i made the speaker vibrate i heard it thru my headphones.

PenPen wrote:If you're wondering how it works, a speaker normally is a magnet + wire coil attached to the paper cone. As current flows through the coil, it pushes the magnet, pushing the cone, making the sonds.

However, if you do it in reverse, and push the cone, thus pushing the magnet, it will induce current into the coil the same way a microphone does.

God I just reread this. No, I'm a bit off.

USUALLY, the coil is attached to the cone, the magnet is stationary. It still reacts the same from the movement or application of current to it.