Microphones: An Odyssey

A Utility of Microphones

Perhaps there was never a more apt collective noun than 'A Utility of Microphones'. One for loud, one for soft. One for fast, one for slow. One for groups, one for singles. One for bight, one for dull. The list goes on. Bring in the Utility of Microphones.

Imagine there was one voice, one song, one record, one Internet music stream...you get the picture. Well, thankfully, there’s a lot more that one of each of the above to keep everyone happy. Artists, engineers and audiences discern daily between the sounds they like and dislike, and it would be some feat indeed to find ‘the sound’. Though it’s true of popular music through the decades to feature ‘a sound’, most will agree that this sound, though is may saturate our hearing for a short period, is not in fact ‘the sound’.

Put it into Context

What is the best-known vocal microphone? We guess Shure SM58 has got to be right up there. Why do so many people always go back to SM58? Most commonly people will say that it is the sound of rock, that it doesn't feedback, that it's undestroyable, that they know the sound because they’ve used it for years at every gig, and because it sounds...'ballsy'. But is SM58 the only choice for vocal reproduction? No.

The Shure SM58 has terrific ‘bottom end’ and has such a ‘ballsy’ sound when you turn it up, because there’s plenty of ‘top end’ that is sitting comfortably in it’s chair rather than punching a fist in the air screaming ‘ROCK’. So if you wind a little bottoms out, add some clarity in the upper mids and highs, crank up the overall output, tighten up the polar pattern to minimise the chances of feedback, you’ll end up with a lovely intelligible ‘engineers choice’ microphone...the Shure Beta58A.

Often in a public address situation where there is no sound engineer, the presenter using one of the above-mentioned microphones comes across as ‘boomy’. Rather then a layperson ‘winding out’ some of the offending lower frequencies (perhaps the signal chain has no such option), it may have been more simply solved at the point of sale, by having a different microphone offered as a choice. Sennehiser e815 and Shure PG58 are just two microphones that are better by miles for ‘unmanned presentation’. Why? Because they have on/off switches, and are naturally void of such a pronounced low-end frequency response – thereby making them pretuned for speech, and a very well-priced alternative. Sometimes it’s easier to save your ‘money’ microphones for the stage and studio, and use somebody else’s suggestion for a podium.

The Perfect Blend

What about instruments? A great example of ‘never too many microphones’ must be the bass drum. Now, work this one out: Sennheiser makes three mics with the description ‘kick drum microphone’, Shure also makes three, AKG makes a couple, as do Beyerdynamic and Audio Technica. Neither Neumann nor Rode make a specific ‘kick drum microphone’ yet plenty of engineers choose these in the studio above the models designed and promoted as kick drum microphones. What sound is it that you are shooting for? Attack of the beater, tone of the shell, or the oomph that is the perfect sum of the two...

The perfect blend - Making a Utility of Microphones work for you

It’s strange how one snare drum can sound so different, depending on who is whacking it. Less strange is how nearly every singer in the world sounds different to the next. What is not strange at all is that ‘my best vocal mic’ won’t sound great with every single singer, and ‘my killer snare mic’ just sometimes doesn’t grab the right sound for a recording. Making a Utility of Microphones (or should that be a Pickup of Microphones) work for you involves a bit of time and memory. Get to know what your mics are capable of. Plug them in often, and use them for heaps of different applications. If in doubt, ask advice...and don’t shy away from experimenting. You may just be the one who discovers ‘the sound’.