"We use a simple Neumann U87 microphone as the house-standard microphone at all of our facilities. They’re expensive, but that’s what we’ve used for years."
Was curious. ~$3600 for the mic set.
Was curious. ~$3600 for the mic set.
As far as mics go, if you don't want to pay thousands for a Neumann, the Austrian Audio OC18 is a fantastic mic with a similarly flat response and has a 3-way switch for different levels of high-pass filtering before the signal even leaves the mic. It's fast becoming my favorite mic to use in the studio.
Thanks to near constant use of auto-tune I think most people realize pop vocals are thin.
Edit: clarification to remove accidental contradiction. I initially ended with "... I think most people realize that," which would have essentially translated to, "Most people realize that pop vocals are thinner than most people realize."
These plugins really exist to save time for large studios, not make bad musicians better. Time is money for studios, so they don't want to waste it on multiple retakes when someone can be close enough to make small fixes with melodyne. For session work, market effects still pressure people to, well, not make mistakes like that. A great singer is still going to be in higher demand than a decent one, because then the studios don't have to spend much time at all fixing their vocals.
Also, -noticeable- autotune can be desired. It's a musical choice. In that sense it's no different than using a vocoder, etc. I personally do not like it but that's the beauty of music; there's something for everyone.
But then the whole production sees similar things all over the place and it gets cleaned right up technically. Time, levels, the works right?
And the energy is diminished, could be lost.
Like fashion, this will all cycle in and out. Young people hear the humanity in music made prior to these and other tools and it appeals.
Little things, like a change in tempo, small vocal errors, inconsistency, all add up in a track.
I bet some time from now, could be as little as a decade, maybe two, we will look back at all this and chuckle.
Like you say, there is nothing technically wrong with any of this tech. And it could all be used very differently from how it is today too.
Recently, I have been going back through great live shows. Fantastic! And I still get that tingle from the realization someone delivered it live, to a crowd. And yeah, not so perfect, but oh so very human too.
Good application of it is not, no. When we hear obvious autotune vocals, it's a deliberate aesthetic choice.
I believe what you're talking about is how modern production is about producing "perfect" song recordings, and mapping everything to a click track/beat grid. Now that is totally noticeable compared to music made a few decades ago. I do agree that it makes music sound sterile. This is separate to autotune/melodyne being used.
"I bet some time from now, could be as little as a decade, maybe two, we will look back at all this and chuckle."
Maybe the main industry studios will, but music in general isn't determined by what those folks are doing. There are more indie publishers than ever, and so on.
And yes! The indies are all over the place. Love it.
Ever since then, it's not bothered me nearly so much when the vocals are tuned. The track hits harder. Yes: it's true the voice loses some of it's natural beauty, but in turn, you get music and voice that follow perfectly.
Now, I really hate hearing it in kids' songs. Sung by kids, for kids, and sounding so flat and blah. Much like laments against modern "beauty" productions, I think excessive autotune presents kids with an unrealistic expectation for their own voices.
The article just said it's not left up to the studio.
Plugins - software for audio programs - are available but audio engineers are famously persnickety.
Further down the audio path it eventually makes sense to digitize, but if you didn't have the HPF in the mic your noise floor will be worse.
Software pipelines only began to get into radio some 20/25 years ago. NPR started in 71
Also software can't do magic (and you aren't processing each microphone digitally), you want to be your signal to be as best as it can as close to the source as you can make it to be.
They gave all the equipment to a pack of monkeys for the night. Anything still working in the morning was certified as reliable.
I don't know if you’ve worked with modern audio software but its truly a tangled stack of complexity, incompatibility, license management, etc etc. It can sound and work great once set up, but its touchy stuff when it comes time to make changes, update the OS, etc. as we all know software is notoriously buggy which is far from ideal in a live scenario.
To clarify a bit, I think that, by "artificial", you mean the boost does not correspond to how the human voice actually sounds, which is true.
But in another sense, it's not artificial. It's a natural side effect of the physics of how microphones work. In building microphones to be directional (favor sounds from, say, in front), they've also made it where the amount of bass picked up is heightened when the mic is very close.
So NPR is artificially (with a high-pass filter) removing a natural side-effect (of directional mics) to avoid getting artificial-sounding boomy bass.
Also, this is one of those accidental invention things where what was originally a side effect has turned into a valued, essential feature. Like guitar amp distortion is part of the electric guitar sound. Or like how resonator guitars (Dobro, National) were invented to be louder but now people like the tone.
He says later on in the article that they try and get people in the studio to not talk directly into the mic but across it. So in some ways they are trying to correct for the issues caused by strong directionality before they get to artificial things like signal filters.
It is so clear that getting a clean analog signal up front is worth a lot.
This is called the Proximity Effect, isn't it?
This week’s video shows a side by side comparison between 3 popular consumer and boutique microphones.
Neumann U87, Røde NT1-A, and Fifine K670.
Are they worth the price difference?? Let’s find out!
I'd say the $250 mic was the best value, but that German mic was niiiice. If you can afford it, then it's probably the one you want.
For simple spoken-word stuff like conferences or streams or whatever, something like a Samson Q2U or an AT2005USB/ATR2100 are less sensitive to unwanted noise and easier for an untrained user to get a good sound out of, while moving into the XLR space gets you access to better dynamic microphones and also some pretty reasonably priced condensers that do quite well (though there's some up-front investment in the audio hardware, of course).
It's actively bad for most people for one reason: capacitive mics pick up everything.
If your room isn't soundproofed, it will be very hard to keep noise out of your recording. Dynamic mics are much less sensitive in this regard.
I would instead recommend a Samson 2Qu or Audio Technica ATR2100-USB on the low end ($70-100) or the Shure MV7 ($250) on the high end for plug-n-play mics.
If you want to move into a cheap audio interface (eg, Focusrite Scarlett Solo + cloudlifter), I'd recommend either the Shure SM7b or the ElectroVoice re20 on the higher end and the Shure sm57 on the cheaper end (good enough for the president to use for the last 40-ish years).
This is a myth that's popular with podcasters. If you get as close to a condenser mic as you must with a less-sensitive dynamic mic* and crank down the gain accordingly, you'll find that condenser mics don't magically capture more ambient noise than than dynamic mics.
* Using a fist as a measure, your mouth should be between 1-2 fists away from the mic.
With a good preprocessor (I use a Symetrix I got from an old radio station), I can crank my dynamic mic (EV RE320) to levels that will pick up anything happening in my entire house, with my office door closed.
It's just that the levels from condenser mics tend to be hotter, so by default you hear more stuff in the room unless you get in close and turn it down.
There's no way to replicate the 'radio' sound if you're 2 or 3 ft away from the mic.
For what it's worth I'm an audio engineering expert, produced albums, broadcast stuff, and used to review professional studio audio equipment for a living for a national magazine.
People like it because it's simple and it looks cool.
If you want something that has the same basic usability, ie plugs directly into USB and is really easy to use with computer audio, buy the Apogee Mic Plus.
I recently experimented with pretty much everything in this category and was very happy with this model, bought a dozen of them for use in a virtual conference series, where I wanted something I could send to non-technical people who'd never be able to navigate a pro audio interface. I've been very happy with it so far.
The mic cost is almost irrelevant though. A good mic will last decades unless abused. Let's say you want a variety of sounds. You buy a bunch of instrument mics (probably $100 each) and a few matched pairs of all the most popular vocal mics (most of those will run 1-2k per pair). You'll probably not spend over 20k in total. Over 20 years, that's only $1,000 per year or less than $100 per month. In that same 20 years, you will have upgraded your digital equipment several times at an expense far greater than $1,000 per year (upgrading your $3,500 macbook every 4 years is the same amount of money).
If you make your money with those mics, that cost is hardly worth mentioning. It's like people complaining that ergonomic keyboards cost $300. The keyboard will easily last a decade or more (only $1-2 per month to save a lot of future pain). In that same time, you'll probably spend 10k+ on other equipment. Same thing with monitors where $1000 will far outlast that same amount of money put into the computer itself.
But then, professional equipment never had economies of scale.
Famously used by Mariah Carey.
In fact, it's coming back with a new SKU (again): https://www.frontendaudio.com/blog/sony-announces-the-c800gp...
I will also say, the NPR person interviewed seems to have a negative view of the RE20 and SM7b compared to the U87. Despite the low cost, SM7Bs are actually popular studio vocal mics. One was famously used to record Michael Jackson's vocals on Thriller (actually it was an SM7 but I believe the SM7B reissue is almost identical). When recording voice, there normally isn't a "silver bullet" mic that is the best for all voices.
And then there are the used vintage mics which can go for $15k+.
At the cheap but well-regarded end of things is the Stellar X2 from TZ TechZone.
It's designed to hold the mic and avoid transmitting vibrations from the mic stand (caused by moving or jostling the stand) to the mic.