In that particularly video I’m using both mics. The SP pickup for the transients only, and then the DPA 4060 for the audio analysis. It would still work without two mics, just in my case I always have the DPA on there anyways and it sounds worlds better than the SP one, and also gives me better audio analysis.
That being said, since I’m not processing the audio here, I’m only measuring relative loudness and spectral shape etc…, the quality of the mic isn’t massively important. Darker sounds will still be darker, brighter sounds will still be brighter etc…
The mic correction stuff I’ve done also mitigates that too since the SP pickup has a very unnatural “sound” to it, so using the corrected version for the audio analysis gives a more perceptually meaningful set of descriptors/analysis.
When I release the SP tools I’ll have a couple options so you can do the same thing with just a single SP pickup (I imagine most people will be in this boat), as well as having options for a secondary “analysis” mic for those are fancy.
This is a really shit/crude demo, but I wanted to show, roughly, what I meant by spectral compensation. What’s happening in that video is that I’m triggering the same sample over and over, and only changing the compensation by applying the spectral envelope of the hits on the drum (which we hear via the camera mic, but aren’t part of the audio playback) or little bursts of colored noise at the start.
As mentioned above, the analysis would work fine with whatever mics you through at it (even contact mics). Having some correction will make it more perceptually meaningful and give you better matching, but the premise is the same. I guess a metaphor might be using one of those motion of shape tracking cameras. It will work on a shitty webcam or a 4k mega camera, since it’s just tracking movement (though a lot more CPU involved for 4k in this example).