two mics: AKG and others

[CyanJaguar]

(how your mic interacts with your room)

hi, yesterday someone here said that he used the selectable patterns on his mic as natural eq, so I decided to check it out.

I am happy to report that I got better results out of my mic (AKG c414 recording vocals) with a few hours of mic placemnt, distance, and patterns

after a lot of listening, through headphones and through my nearfields, I finally decided that I preffered the figure eight pattern best, singing at about 6-8 inches from the mic. It had the most roundness

I had previously been singing about one inch from the mic, using a cardoid pattern, and even though this was also good, it tended to accentuate the ringing in my voice and the bass. (I confess, I did it like that because it sounded good on the digi001 video)
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What I would like is for you guys to please post the distances and patterns that have given you the best result with AKG and other mics as well so that I and others can try them out and see if we can get even better sound out of our beasts

peace

ps. my second favorite pattern was the omnidirectional pattern at 6 inches(it picked up the most ambience) and my worst was the cardoid pattern. now I know why the dude on prorec.com said that the selectable patterns on the rode nt2 make it worth the $200 price differnce between it and the rode nt1

 

[CyanJaguar]

Well I just went back and did some more tests, and I must say that after layering the sounds in the tracks and panning them to different speakers, I think that my second best is the hypercardoid pattern and not the omni pattern

 

[Recording Engineer]

Always Hard To Make General Statements

Your "favorite" or "prefered" pattern and position will depend on so many things.

 

[dobro]

Bingo. It depends on your room, your voice, and whether or not an angel happens to be sitting on your B string while you're tracking.

I really think you're right about the multiple-pattern mic thing. I've experimented and experimented with positions with my mics, and I've come to the conclusion that what I need is two mics with figure-8 patterns. NT-1s don't do that. Fuck. Live and learn. I've got five mics, and out of all of them, I've got this little plastic doodah I can bung into my AKG C1000 that'll change it from cardioid to hypercardioid. Great.