The 8 Best Bass Drum Mics
Special Honors
Miktek Audio T200 If you're looking for something applicable to live use without necessarily having the frequency response to bring out the lowest of low tones in a studio setting, this is a fine choice. It can handle tremendous sound pressures, and its high end doesn't suffer from that agonizing click you usually have to mix out for the sake of an audience's ear drums. miktekaudio.com
Editor's Notes
April 24, 2020:
While you might be interested in applying a little natural distortion to your bass drum sound, either through compression or tube-drive effects, there's a good chance that you'd prefer to have total control over that change in tone, and that capturing as clean a drum sound as possible is preferable to you. To that end, we saw fit to remove the Electro-Voice PL33, the distortion of which may have been overlooked in a raucous live setting for a punk band, but could be compromising to the sound of other live genres, and possibly destructive to the final product any musicians sought out in the studio.
In its place we added the Sennheiser e901 Boundary Layer, which is a class of condenser microphone that was sadly underrepresented in our last ranking. These mics live in the floor of a kick and pick up a world of tones and overtones from inside the instrument. They tend to lack some of the punch you get from positioning a dynamic mic just outside the kick's sound hole, but combined with one, they give you a lot more color to play with in post production.