Saturday, September 20, 2008

Mics and Goofy Engineers

This post didn't start with a question but because of some goofy recording engineers. I went in the studio for a session yesterday, set up my head on a cab that they had there and went out for a coffee while they got their mics set up. When I came back, there was 12 mics on and around the amp. Needless to say, this gave me a good crack-up. I've never seen so many mics on one amp. Anyways, they had me play an improvised solo for a minute and they recorded 12 separate tracks (one for each of the mics). Then they had me listen, without knowing what was what, to each one and pick the mics I liked the best. As usual, the Shure '57 won. The SM57 is about the cheapest mic there is (about 80 bucks) and always sounds great on Celestion speakers. Coming in second was the Sennheiser e906, going for about $180.00. It is supposedly designed specifically for guitar amps. It seems to have a little bit more high end compared to the '57, while the '57 offers nice midrange. For the ambient mic, I picked the AKG C414 B-XLS/ST, which is about a two-thousand dollar mic. I actually liked these three mics in combination, panning the '57 and e906 slightly left and right. They later mixed the track with reverb on the ambient track and stereo delay on the two close mic tracks. Pretty fat sound:


No comments: