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My favorite recording equipment!
My favorite recording equipment!
My primary line of work is as a production technician for performance arts, so I've worked with audio equipment almost daily for over a decade now setting up microphones for singers and getting musicians instruments properly mic'd up. For most purposes, especially in live settings the Shure SM57 is exactly what you need. They shine working with drums, acoustic instruments, windwoods and brass, and for speaking purposes the SM58 covers the bases. Although in reality, the internals are effectively the same -- the designs are to force your audio input source distance, where the grill of the SM58 pushes the vocalist back compared to the SM57 which is able to be pressed up close to the bass drum, or underneath the snare drum.
However, in a home audio setting I personally don't have many of the needs that the SM57 and the SM58 fit, since most of my audio I run through the Mackie Mix 8 directly into my DAW, and I don't have a drumset. For my clarinet and acoustic guitars, Condenser Microphones generally aren't ideal due to their extreme sensitivity to picking up sounds. For example, in a quiet room you can hear birds from an open window. This makes condenser mics phenomenal for recording singers, recording for podcasting, and because of their directional sensitivity, their incredible capability at recording the presence of a room. As such the perfect way to record analog instruments like the clarinet or the acoustic guitar is by finding the right distance away from the mic in your recording space.
And with that we come to the MXL V67G Condenser Mic! This is an incredible mic that is perfect for anyone with a quiet recording space looking to record podcasts, voiceover recording, or singing will be blown away by the crisp clarity with a softness that you may not have known your voice had. As I said, condenser mics are very sensitive so I highly recommend a quiet recording space, but these are directional microphones which means you can easily create a dampening box, about 1.5 feet of a plastic/wood box lined with sound dampening foam. Another important thing to note about this microphone is it requires an XLR input and 48v power, so you'll need a mixer that supplies phantom power in order to use this microphone.
I use this microphone for recording audiobooks on ACX and for when I record voiceovers. There's really no comparing the difference in quality of microphones, I think many people have become accustomed to the lack of clarity that we hear from phone and video calls, and even nicer quality content is somewhat diminished when we just hear it played over our phones speakers when scrolling through our content feed. After your first recording session with the MXL V67G hearing yourself on playback is guaranteed to blow you away.
When on the search for mixers, look no further than Mackie. Rarely does anyone want to compromise with quality and mixers are no exception because a noisy mixer means ALL of your audio recording has that same unwanted intrusion. For peace of mind, I always run my mixers through a power filtering surge protector, and remember your equipment is only as good as your setup. If you have to cross audio and power cables, cross them in an X. Never run audio and power lines in parallel because any non-insulated cable will pick up that electricity in your recording. Guitarists may recognize hearing a "ticking" sound when they get a text message near their guitar plugged into the amp, and this is a very similar concept. The magnets on the guitar pickups are strong enough to detect the signal from texts. Audio cables are transmitting electric signal, and that signal travels AROUND the wires, not through them. Because of that running heavy load wattage cables can seriously impact your audio quality.
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