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Any body know of a cheap microphone that is good for recording percussion on pc.
Nothing serious just acceptable sound, something 50$ or less.

a used Shure sm57.

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Are you looking to record directly onto your PC? You might be looking for a nice USB mic then. Blue Microphones- Snowball mic seems like a decent one. It may be a bit more than $50, but maybe you can buy something used. I use a Zoom H2 Handheld recorder. I use it to record my band playing live as well as for recording onto my computer. It costs even more than the Snowball however it can serve more than 1 purpose. A neat tool to assess your playing and recording onto the pc.

mrhands wrote: I use a Zoom H2 Handheld recorder. I use it to record my band playing live as well as for recording onto my computer. It costs even more than the Snowball however it can serve more than 1 purpose. A neat tool to assess your playing and recording onto the pc.

I have a Zoom H4 and have found it to be very useful and versatile. The 4-track recording feature is really nice to have too. It's just packed with features that you may or may not use, but it is still a worthwhile investment if you are flexible with your preferred cost! I've used it for recording music workshops and lessons and also recorded a couple of pretty decent bootlegs too!

The purpose is for personal recording. I figured I have a pc and can get free software then all I need is a mic. So far its not working out that easy, got some latency issues with the laptop need to make it work with asio4all and all that. A portable multitrack would be nice, wish it had more than 4 tracks though.

Sounds like you want to do overdubbing, talking about latency, ASIO, and 4 or more tracks. Latency is hardware dependent but has nothing to do with the mic, unless it is a USB mic (which I have never tried). I have a pretty cheap analog/digital interface, an M-Audio Delta 66 with a PCI card in an old pentium PC, Win XP, and can get it down to 128 sample buffer, which at 44,100 samples per second is about 3 milliseconds. Double that for 2 way in/out, and 6 milliseconds is audible for a percussionist but not terrible. On your laptop, fIrewire or USB2 will increase your latency a bit for the inexpensive interfaces, but can give very low latencies on more expensive interfaces. Lower buffers and I get glitches even with single track recording. You can do one track at a time, listening to the recorded tracks through headphones as you play the next track. You can record stereo room sound if you have 2 tracks, but unless you have a studio with some way to isolate instruments, it may not be worth getting more than 2 simultaneous inputs.

For mics, I like the Shure SM57, it is the best mic I have heard for recording congas under $100. The SM58 is very similar. Sennheiser 604 or 904, Beyerdynamic Opus 87, Oktava MC012, and a few others are decent as well, but mostly cost more than the 57. Pro studios like the Sennheiser MD421 for congas, but those are much more money and break very easily. I prefer a separate mic stand to a mic mounted on the drum for recording, I find it hard to isolate the mounted mic so it does not pick up direct sound through the shell of the drum, which does not sound good.

If you don't want to do overdubbing, just record playing in real time, +1 on the Zoom H2. I use mine all the time to record rumbas and they come out pretty good.

By the way, we had a nice rumba in Paterson Saturday night.

Jorge, yes thats exactly what I'm doing. I found a shure sm57 with stand and wire in my price range, looks new. The guy has 2 more if you are interested. Haven't tried it out yet though. I don't have an interface. I'm actually using a netbook with Kristal audio software and going to be connecting the mic right to the sound input. Doing it on the cheap. I got the latency thing almost where I want it but not there yet.
" By the way, we had a nice rumba in Paterson Saturday night."
Nice! is it going to be a regular thing? Would like to check it out if you guys don't mind..