well, that didn’t last: bongo drum mic clip take two
Remember my unexpectedly easy mic stand mount for a pair of bongo drums? It lasted exactly as long as it needed to, but not one second longer. The midrange drums recording I was doing - they may be bongos technically but I wasn’t playing them in that style - I got completely done. Then when I started taking the drum off the stand - CRACK! The epoxy separated and that was that.
But having the drums on a mic stand was pretty cool, and I’d like to be able to do it again later. So I’ve come up with a Mark II mount system! I’ll call it the Drumclip, even though “drum clip” means a different thing elsewhere. I’m not 100% sure this is a final design - I’ll talk about that more below - but it’s 98% final.
Like the previous attempt, this is very simple, and still under $10. First, order a cheap but metal microphone bar, or double mic attachment. This is a small device you can screw onto on a single mic stand to make a little platform that will hold two to three microphones. I found this one online for under $10, with shipping:
Now like the name says, this is a drumclip, a mic stand clip for drums. And it’s going to attach to the connector bridge between the two drums.
TIME FOR SOME METALBENDING!
Sadly, I can’t do it that way. I have to do it with hammers and an anvil and a big bench clamp. But if you have those tools, it’s very simple.
Remember the hole I drilled into the drum’s bridge, for the first attachment? It’s still there, and looks like this:
Take the mic platform and pop the centre mic attachment into that hole. Make sure it’s perpendicular to the plastic bridge, and mark where the sides of the platform would meet the metal if the corners weren’t so rounded.
If your bridge is more square than mine, you can just mark where they meet. Mine is all rounded at the corners so I have to allow for that. You may not need to. But just follow the wall down to where it would meet the metal, if it didn’t curve in first.
That’s where you want to bend your new drum clip. Draw lines on both sides. I used a knife, but whatever is visible works.
You could also measure the width of the bridge and mark that, centred, on the bridge. It’s the same thing, and again, those marks are where to bend the clip.
Then remove the microphone attachment knobs and centre mic attachment. Place the platform bar into the bench clamp so that the top of the clamp is right on one of the lines you made, and start hammering it over!
this is why it needs to be metal. plastic is not so good here.
You want to hammer down near the clamp point, or you’ll end up warping the base of your new Drumclip. Don’t worry about getting “too sharp” a corner, you won’t. Just make sure that clamp is nice and tight, so it doesn’t slip! Then flip and do the other side.
If you do warp the base a bit, you can hammer that back to flat pretty easily. However, you only want to do that once, because doing that repeatedly will weaken the metal. So if you start to bend it, don’t fix it immediately; get the sides bent into place, then hammer the base flat again, so you’re doing it only once.
If you have to do it more than once, for a small drum pair, it’s not too big a deal. But if you did this for larger drums, it would be a bad idea in general, really a very big deal.
You want to hammer the platform into a sharp-cornered U shape, but so that the sides are just past vertical, and angled in just a bit, to give it a better grip on the bridge connecting the drums. Once you’ve done that, it’ll slide on and hold pretty well.
This is where I actually needed that hole I made for the first attempt - it’s there so the platform stand attachment that came with the microphone bar (and which you removed earlier) can screw all the way in. That provides an extra bit of attachment security.
In my case, I ended up gluing that attachment into a permanent vertical position. I also tried doing it using double-sided tape on the silver metal piece as glue, because I like reversible changes better than I like epoxy. But that wasn’t strong enough, and the drum set kept tipping slowly over, so - epoxy it is.
Of course, after doing that, I realised that you don’t need the extender at all. This drumclamp will screw straight onto the mic stand just fine. So yay, unnecessary work. But that may not be true for other microphone platforms. And even in my case, it’s a little less awkward to use the platform stand attachment as kind of an extender than to attach directly to the stand, so it’s not a total loss.
Here’s the drum and clip and extender on the mic stand:
Yay! It works! But this gets to the design bit I’m not sure about.
You’ll remember from the first picture that the platform comes with knobs on each ends. These are for attaching other microphone clips so you can then attach microphones.
Right now, I’m using them as very slight tensioners on the sides of the drum’s bridge. Or that’s what I tell myself. In practical terms, it’s really just for storage and appearance. It does look better with them, don’t you think?
The question is: should I drill two more holes, one on each side of the plastic bridge, so that these knobs can screw all the way in? That would certainly make the drumclip more secure; it simply couldn’t move left to right.
But I’m also worried that two more holes might overly weaken the bridge. Were it metal, I wouldn’t be concerned about that. But it is of course plastic, so I am.
Any materials engineers got opinions?
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