Becuase the pub where I play (Blarney Stone, Dong Ping Lu, Shanghai)regularly gets very noisy on a Friday night we all have had to use amplifiers and a sound deck to get over background noise.

Initially I micced/miked (is that the correct spelling, jOhn please help) up using a Schaller contact mikes on the rim of my bodhrans, however I was not over happy with the sound as these tpyes of mike just tend to pick up the bass end as they do not operate acoustically.

Then we tried playing against a normal mike on a stand, better,but keeping a correct distance from the mike head was awkward as it tended to get in the way when you were bracing and pushing the skin with the left hand.

More so as I have several bodhrans of varying sizes which all meant I was constantly adjusting my position with regards the mike as well as adjusting the stand boom.

While I was over in the UK recently I picked up a Yamaha MC7 pickup mike and a Yamaha ST9 pre-amp. What I like was that it could be clipped to the rim or the cross bar and had a flexible connection to the mike head so I could position the head very quickly with regards distance from the skin. It does not get in the way and is easy to move between drums.

Though primarily designed for wind instruments it has a good wide frequency range and picks up the whole sound from the skin not just the bass vibration from the rim as the contact mike did.