Is it easy to tell which mic will sound good on a particular source ?

grimtraveller

grimtraveller

If only for a moment.....
At what point in your recording life were you able to work out which mics you had were right for particular voices or instruments ?
Was this something that you could tell right away or did it take a long while or a short while ?
 
It took me quite a long time to where I can a least have some pretty good guesses. But then I never did this day in and day out like you's in the trenches :D
 
grimtraveller said:
At what point in your recording life were you able to work out which mics you had were right for particular voices or instruments ?
Was this something that you could tell right away or did it take a long while or a short while ?
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Well....unless you try 20 mics on a voice or instrument, there's no way you will ever know.
I've done mic auditions for a variety of things...guitar cabs, piano, organ, vocals....and I have my handful of go-to mics, and also a lot of bench warmers.

When I get a new mic, I'll try it on a few sources, and decide if it's better than the other one(s) I'm currently using, or not. Sometimes one mic replaces another....sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes I just get bored with a particular mic choice and just go and grab a different mic from the bench warmers, just to change things up a bit....and I'll make a mental note of how well that mic performed. There are a bunch of mics that all sound good...just different flavors, so it depends on what flavor the song is.


Sometimes I'm just lazy...and I'll use the same mic for a lot of tracks. :)
 
I still don't know.

Trial and error is my primary methodology. I really try to avoid getting into habits of doing things the same way I have in the past and try to keep doing things differently each time out as best I can. It's just more fun for me that way.
 
heatmiser said:
Trial and error is my primary methodology. I really try to avoid getting into habits of doing things the same way I have in the past and try to keep doing things differently each time out as best I can.
Click to expand...
That's how I came to start being able to differentiate certain mics. I'd rarely do something the same way twice. Then a combo of that and listening to what people had to say about various mics kind of gradually absorbed and I would notice the kind of colouring a mic gave. It came into sharp focus when someone gave me a virtually new Rode mic with various pads and settings and I noticed it could give a sound so bright, it was almost like EQ ! They had also given me an AKG C1000 and it felt over sensitive at times, easy to distort at settings other mics were OK at.
But it took me 20 years to get to that point because to me, a mike was just a mic.
 
There's a way to have what you're looking for. Of course, it will not work 100% of the time, but it's good way to guess amongst the best mics you could use for a given source.
I always pick a mic that is complementary to the source. Have a really bright source? Take the mic you know that have the sweetest highs...most of the time (in my case) a ribbon mic.
Have a sound that is more on the bass side, lacking of definition? Do the opposite. A mic that doesn't have a lot of bottom and that have more pronounced high-mids and highs.

Normally, from that point, I'll have to try maybe just one other mic and most of the times, when in a rush, my first guess works.
Of course, it works when you know well the sound of all the mics at hands.
 
This isn't a request for ways to match the right mic to the source, I'm curious as to when in their recording progression people recording began to be able to do that. At what point did you start to think "this mic doesn't seem to capture this sound as well as that mike but it does a better job on that sound than this mic" ? And how did you conclude it was the mike and not the way you were using it, placing it or amplifying it ?
 
If the mic looks "fashionable" with the sound source, it will probably work great. This changes with the times, however. The 70-80s was the U87 era. God knows what today's fashion is with Lady Ga-Ga and all.
 
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