LEWITT AUDIO – DTP Beat Kit Pro 7 Drum Mic Pack Review

ADVERTISEMENT

Hey guys, today I’m checking out the DTP Beat Kit Pro 7 by Lewitt Audio. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Lewitt, they are a fairly new microphone company out of Austria. I have been hearing great things about their microphones for a while, and now we have finally gotten our hands on some, so let’s dive right in!

The DTP Beat Kit Pro 7 is a mic kit for drums. It comes in a nice, big sturdy case. It includes 2 LCT 340 small diaphragm condenser mics for overheads, 3 DTP 340 TT tom mics, a MTP 440 DM snare mic, and a DTP 640 REX dual capsule kick drum mic for a total of 7 microphones. There are 2 things I want to mention about some of these mics. First, the 2 LCT 340 Small Diaphragm condenser mics have 3 different low cut and 4 different attenuation settings that you can choose from. 40 Hz, 150 Hz, 300 Hz for the low cut and 0 dB, -6 dB, -12 dB, -18 dB for the attenuation. They also come with interchangeable heads. They come with cardioid heads on them by default and additional omnidirectional heads that are included in this kit that they can be switched out for. And finally, all the settings light up once phantom power is running through them, which I found pretty handy. The other thing I want to mention is the DTP 640 REX used for the kick drum is no ordinary mic. It incorporates a dual element design, a dynamic capsule and a condenser capsule in one mic where each has their own separate output.

So how does it sound? You can judge for yourself from the demo but I can tell you this – I can’t recall a time in which I mic’d up a kit and got such good and useable sounds just from the recording. It just didn’t need anywhere near the amount of processing I usually need to do. The snare mic was nice and bright, but still retained that fat sound of the snare. The overheads picked up the cymbals in great detail. Usually, I run into the issue where the cymbals sound way to sizzle-y with too much going on in the high frequencies. The overhead mics captured the kit and the cymbals just right with no harshness in the upper frequencies, very clear and defined. The tom mics were great at picking up the attack of the tom hits and their supercardioid polar pattern made sure that isolation was the best it could be. In all 3 toms, I ran into no issues with bleed from other parts of the drum kit. Last but not least is my favorite part of the mic set, the DTP 640 REX kick drum mic. This microphone blew me away, I have never gotten a kick drum to sound so good with out any processing at all. In fact, half the time I feel compelled to sample replace to augment a kick drum, because a lot of time it just doesn’t sound good. With the DTP 640 REX the kick didn’t just sound good, it sounded great! Easily workable in any mix with minimal processing and effort. It’s crazy to think how much a difference a microphone can make, and this is one of those instances where the microphone makes such a big difference that anyone listening to it would be able to immediately tell. It’s by far the best kick drum sound I have ever gotten from a single microphone on a kick drum.

My final thoughts on the Lewitt DTP Beat Kit Pro 7 are pretty short and simple – they’re great! If you are looking for a full set of mics for your drum recordings, these are probably it. I have tried other kits in the past, in fact, before using the Beat Kit Pro 7 I was using the very popular drum mic kit by Audix, and the Lewitt far and way are all better mics for serious studio recording. You just can’t go wrong with these.

Written by

Alex Nasla is a keyboardist, producer and mixing engineer. He keeps busy making audio plugins for Rosen Digital, is audio director at multimedia company Toxic Creativity and is involved in 3 different musical endeavors. 

Latest comment
  • Sadly the mix is all wrong and in fact covering up a lot of the drums the very thing we wanted to hear

leave a comment