Creek of Whispering person:
If you have an 8 track tape recorder, which I am assuming, just follow the recording steps; to listen to your cut, you need to set up the cue part of your recorder; then, you can listen to your vocal which will be plenty loud if you have recorded at a level recommended in the manual. When you MIX-Down your product you turn OFF all of the CUE buttons and use the faders and E-Q and reverb unit to adjust your recording to proper levels before you put it on cassette or another medium.
If your mic requires phantom power and you do not supply that power, you will not get much out of your mic.
My Yamaha MD-8 digital recorder has phantom power built in. But, I also have a mic-pre-amplifier that I use which gives vocals a nice clear sound, like to old great Sinatra recordings.
Remember, the CUE sections is there so that if you do multiple tracks, drums, bass, keys, violins, etc., you RECORD one additive track at a time, usually, and all OTHER TRACKS MUST BE IN THE CUE MODE SO YOU DON'T GET TRACK BLEEDING OR BOUNCING which will give you garble city. Read the manual and then read it again. Use the net to get into specific chat groups, e.g., Tascam users or Yam users. Hope this helps.
The Green Hornet