Maybe you already have the best vocal mic

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Maybe you already own the right gear.

For a year or two I have been doing consulting (and mastering) for a great artist from Indiana named Briagha McTavish and her producer/father, Neil. On a recent trip to LA they came by the studio to have me help them pick out the best vocalmic for her.  They brought their own mics to add to the ones I have in my personal collection and we borrowed and rented a few others to get a good wide range of microphones including condensers, ribbons and moving coil dynamics. The value of the mics we tried ranged from about $100 to well over $3,000.

One of the big things I have learned about comparisons and “shoot outs” between gear is that people will usually pick the louder option as the “better” option, and that we will very often pick the one we expect to sound better as the one that sounds better (even if it doesn’t). So I had my engineer (and RBC associate instructor), Diego Lopez, set up the mic shoot outs in a way that I would not know which mic was which when we listened. He also made sure all the recordings were level matched.

One thing that was obvious is that a voice as good as Briagha’s is a hard thing to make sound bad with any mic, but we did find that some of the mics sounded surprisingly similar and others radically different. Many sounded good and, oddly enough, the two mics that sounded the worst on her voice were the least expensive mic in the shoot out and the most expensive!!

In the end it came down to a VERY close tie between a Pearlman TM-1, an Audio-Technica AT4050, and a vintage Neumann U87. Each mic sounded great overall, but each mic had particular aspects where it beat out the others (better on high notes, better on low notes, etc). In the end we decided that all 3 of these mics sounded great on her voice and none could be described as truly better than the other two.  The great thing about this is that the Audio Technica 4050 was a mic they already owned and had used on her recent EP. Buying new equipment is, of course, exciting and tons of fun, but it is important to make sure that when you spend part of your limited budget the money is going to the right place…. Speaking of which, after the mic shoot out we tried recording Briagha with the AT 4050 through one of the high-end compressors at my studio and the improvements were dramatic. So now, instead of spending money on an expensive mic that would not be an improvement, they can use that money on an investment that can make a big difference.

The important take away is not that the 4050 was a “better” mic than the others, but that it was the right match for this singers voice. In the previous shoot outs I did for another project the Pearlman TM-1 was the winner, and before that it was a Shure SM7B.

To hear Briagha McTavish’s music check out www.briaghamctavish.com