Posts Tagged ‘microphone’
Apogee ‘Mic’ Review
I finally bought an iPhone. I’d been on the fence for a while, and in the end it was not so much the iPhone itself that convinced me (I really like my Android, which has a few features the iPhone would do well to copy) as it was the fact that I needed one in order to use Apogee’s new ‘Mic’.
Click on the image to read my review and hear the Mic.
There’s a lot to say about microphones, and I’ll admit that there’s still a lot of mystery in them to me, as I don’t understand a lot of the technical stuff about how they work, but I have a pretty good understanding of why some are better than others in a given application, so I’m going to try to explain some of that here.
I’ve gotten a bunch of emails asking me what to buy in order to get started, so I thought I’d try to address the issue. GSI doesn’t carry any of the stuff I’m talking about, so I have no bias there, but I still have a few caveats: I haven’t used most of the products I’m talking about, so I can only really explain what does what and how it works; you can spend anywhere from nothing (assuming you already have a computer) to tens of thousands of dollars on this stuff; there are so many brands and models of each thing to choose from that there’s no way I can cover them all, but this should help you figure out what, if anything, you need to buy.
Mic placement and input levels are two of the things that will most affect the sound of your recording, so in part two of my ongoing series on recording I try to break it down a little and offer a few suggestions for getting the best sounding you can. I also included a couple of MP3s so you can hear the difference levels and mic placement can make.
We get a lot of emails from people asking us how best to record their guitars, and since I happen to run a little recording studio here in Los Angeles I thought it might be a good idea to start a series on the recording process. So here’s the first part of my series, in which I’m going to introduce the concept of signal flow, which is basically how sound travels from an instrument into a computer (or a tape machine, back in the day) and then eventually back out through speakers. The better you understand how signal flows from the source (instrument or voice) back to your ears, the easier every step of the process will be along the way.
I’m the first to admit that I’ve probably written way too much here, but I didn’t feel right leaving any of this out. At the bottom of the article you’ll find a few points to get you started if you really don’t care about any of this and just want to get started.
This might make everyone’s life a bit better – Blue Microphones (they’ve lately been branching out into more consumer stuff, buy they started out making great studio mics, so they definitely know how to do that. I’ve used some of their capsules in the studio for years now and I love them.) is coming out with a microphone that attaches directly to the newer generation Flip cameras (it won’t work on my older one – wah). Hopefully this will make YouTube sound a whole lot better, not to mention everyone’s home recordings of their new guitars. I think it’s going to street at somewhere between $60 and $80, and it should be coming out very soon.
It probably won’t replace the Sony PCM D50 that we use to demo guitars here at the showroom, but it’ll be a great step up from the lousy audio quality of the Flip cameras, and you won’t have to manually sync audio in a DAW to get decent sound on your videos. I’ve tried Blue’s Mikey for recording with the iPod and the sound is downright acceptable.
OK – This has nothing to do with guitars, but it’s one of the cool prototype things we saw at NAMM. Sennheiser is trying out this idea of a microphone-based controller that would allow you to control things like volume, effects or loops directly from the mic itself. Check it out.
