middleaudio.com

So I've noticed a trend with people doing these "shootouts" of mic's specifically, and although some of these things can be interesting at times, it's gotten out of hand. I've heard several voice samples where the passes have been obviously tuned, as well as other heavy processing, which IMO makes it completely impossible to tell what is going on between examples. I'm not using these things for anything other than entertainment most of the time, but come on... Why even bother?

At first, I thought you meant one mic was raw audio, while the other mic had processing afterwards. But you mean both samples are processed afterwards, right?

The thinking must be similar to distortion-pedal demonstrations I've seen on Youtube; most demos have the pedal going through an amp, which of course affects the sound, but makes it sound nicer. I've only seen one person demo pedals direct, without an amp, for the purpose of demonstrating the pedal itself...most comments on his vids are "dude, ur supposd to put it rhough an amp, lol."

That said: holy hell, what you described people doing would be useless for microphones.

You must spend more time on GS than I do. I spend all my time at The Womb or here, so I don't come across it at all.

Mathieu Benoit wrote:You must spend more time on GS than I do. I spend all my time at The Womb or here, so I don't come across it at all.

I can't hear the examples from work but is this the thread that caught your eye/ear?

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/640294-512c-m149.html

Mathieu Benoit wrote:I can't hear the examples from work but is this the thread that caught your eye/ear?

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/640294-512c-m149.html

No. Nothing in particular, just hearing a lot of these things lately specifically on voice that makes no sense. I was listening to a few and I thought, once it's that harshly tuned, what am I hearing exactly? Certainly not the "mic" anymore.

I was in the car this morning with my girlfriend when I was test driving the mix I did last night for Dylan's song "Sway". She loved it and said it sounded as good (if not better than) as other things that I had done myself before, then asked the next obvious question: Does he have expensive equipment too? I said no, he's got a couple of decent microphones into some pretty basic preamps that are likely built into his interface. She replied with, "Why do you guys need so much stuff then?"

Well that's a loaded question... haha.

I had to explain to her that if we wanted to be taken seriously as a commercial facility people expect us to have a certain range of equipment to cover our needs which are much greater than that of the solo act in a project studio. We also charge hourly so much of our equipment is there to help speed up the process as well as being able to facilitate recording many things all at once without sacrificing quality. It boils down to client driven expectation, and efficiency really.

I also explained that if someone wanted to be taken seriously as an engineer, they should be able to make it work even when the equipment and/or environment isn't ideal. But these are completely different rules of engament.

I explained to her that Dylan tracked thing well without the limitations of his preamps and captured great performances, the rest is fairly straight forward.

Her point still stands though, Dylan recorded a great vocal without have a multi-thousand dollar mic in his cabinet. Could it have been better? Coulda, shoulda, woulda... Who cares.

I'm starting to care less about what I'm using after I did some tracks a couple weeks ago. I was going into my focusrite satfire pro 40/ berhinger preamps with my AT4040 in front of the kit and my AT4041's on top of the kit. I had a 57 reeeeaaaallllyyy far away from the snare top and the rest of the mics on the kit were just a cheap shure PG drum mic kit. Not to mention the drummer was playing his tama rockstar kit......All in all it was probably the best drum sound I've ever had. The guy playing drums is really good at tuning and he spent a good half hour getting every drum drum perfect.