Although miking musical instruments is often a matter of experimentation, Church Business asked some experts in the field to get you headed in the right direction. Here's what they had to say, from drums to organs. Miking requires both an understanding of the sound source to be miked and the microphone itself. Condenser mics require a power source to work either from a battery or a phantom power supply, but dynamic mics do not.
Condensers work better on softer or distant sources, such as voices or stringed instruments.
Each microphone has a distinct polar pattern. For live sound, I almost always use a uni-directional mic to isolate one source from another and to help control feedback from monitors. For example, if you're miking individual drums and a piano, any drum sound picked up by the piano mic is leakage. For example, suppose you're miking two adjacent tom-toms with two hypercardioid mics. The null of the hypercardioid is 110 degrees off-axis.