As part of the Home Recording 101 class at Revolution Audio, this past Thursday we did a shootout of 6 vocal mics. The mics selected were some of the top sellers at the store and ranged in price from the M-Audio Nova at $119 to the AT4060 at $1905.
You may wonder why there are so many M-Audio mics in this shoot out. Well that’s because they make good mics for the price, we had a variety on hand, and it seems like these mics don’t get a lot of attention.
The mics:
M-Audio Nova
Audio Technica AT2035
M-Audio Solaris
M-Audio Sputnik
AKG C 414 B-XL II
Audio-Technica AT4060
The source was Kate singing the first line of ’9 Crimes’ by Damien Rice. Each recording is a separate take, though she is very consistent. No processing has been done. Drop all the files into your DAW, keep the piano track active if you like. Scroll down to the bottom to get the files. The order of the files has been changed so you’ll need to guess which is which.
Leave a comment with which mic sounds like the best fit for her voice and I’ll email you the answers.
Other things to think about:
Which mic sounds like it’s the cheapest?
Which mic sounds the most expensive?
Which 2 mics are the tube mics?
I guess this isn’t really a trick, but since I don’t often read manuals for software this option went unnoticed for a long time. I was always cursing that some of my favorite plugins would only work on stereo tracks. This was a big pain in the ass for gates (like ReaGate, which I prefer over the digi Dyn3 Expander/Gate because there’s no latency) and especially for guitar amps (like the awesome Nick Crow 7170, 8505 and LePou SoloC). By default these show up in the wrapper program as stereo plugins, which means they would only show up on stereo tracks. I did NOT know this was a user assignable parameter! I’ve been using this program for over a year! Facepalm. See the picture below, click to enlarge.
So just for fun I looked up what the manual has to say about this:
CanMono
This column reports whether a plug-in can operate in mono. If a mono to stereo
or stereo to stereo plug-in can operate in mono, it will also appear as a mono
plug-in in Pro Tools. This parameter is user-editable, so that you can force plug-
ins to operate in mono.
Yep, I’m an idiot. I wish I knew about this a year ago!
I hope this helps someone else, it certainly made my last mix better.
Lately I’ve been finding this new plugin TT Dynamic Range Meter by Pleasurize Music Foundation to be useful. I use it for two things, when I’m building a mix up I have it on the master so I can have nice big meters showing peak and RMS, this helps me keep things a conservative level from the start. The other thing I use this for is the MONO button. Setting your balances and even panning in Mono can really help. My interface doesn’t have a mono button on it (my 002r did but my 2626 doesn’t) so the MONO button on this plug makes it really simple.
My only complaint about this is the plugin is HUGE! It takes up nearly a 1/4 of my 22″ monitor
Oh yeah…it’s FREE! VST|RTAS|AU Mac/PC so everyone can play. A great weapon for fighting the loudness war, whichever side you’re on.
They also have an offline program to analyze the dynamic range of audio files, might be useful to some.
This time the project is an hardcore/emo style rock song, fairly poppy and should be fun to mix. I used a bit to much Space Echo in mine, but sometimes too much is just right, especially when it comes to Space Echo.
Participate in the Mix This #4 project here: Mix This #4. It’s in the members only section so you must sign up to participate or get the files.
If you’re looking for some multitrack projects to practice mixing on, this is for you.
