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Emily Burns
You may not know it, but the title of my blog this week is oh, so true. I was unaware of this until just recently....So, that being said, I wanted to tell all of you about my latest obsession-the Royer R-121 (or R-122) RIbbon Mic. There is only one way to describe the combo of this mic and ANY guitar amp and for that, I feel the lyrics of Usher are very appropraite, "Oh-My-Gosh" (Sorry....that reference comes purely from living on a cruise ship for too long and being subjected to the music in the crew bar on a regular basis....) Anyways, I digress. If you are a guitarist that has spent years, months, or even decades honing in 'your sound' that is a combination of your amp, your cabinets, your guitars, your boutique pedals, etc, etc, and have gone to record this amazing sound only to find it strangely altered and sounding nothing like what it originally did-it's because you weren't using the Royer R-121.
If you do a search for this mic on the web, you'll quickly find that it is praised and hailed as the be-all to end-all mic for recording electric guitar amps by famed engineers and musicians alike. If you visit Royer's website, they give you sound bytes and clips of just a couple of the millions of recordings that the 121 has graced. This mic is so sturdy and amazing, many of the great guitarists out there (Trey Anastasio, John Fogerty, Brain Setzer, and Sonny Landreth-just to name a few) will even use this mic for their live set-up. Somewhere along the line, it seemed ribbon mics had gone the way of the dodo bird so to speak. Engineers and musicians had stopped using them due to their lack of applications and extreme sensitvity to roughness. Damaging the actual ribbon itself was very easy to do and for these reasons, people got turned off on these mics that needed too much TLC. I believe Royer is on a misson to change people's minds about ribbon mics and remove those aspects that made the the ribbon mic a bit of a "diva" to work with. Not only is this mic AMAZING for recording electric guitar amps but it's also frequently used for acoustic guitars, horns, strings, and vocals! This mic is so sturdy people have been known to even use it as an outer mic for the front of a kick drum as well as for overheads. So, in short, if you are searching for that 'Holy Grail' of a mic to record your guitar tones, look no further! In my opinion, this mic should be the newest staple to any serious guitarists toolbox! Below is the link to Royer's website and below that, a link to the sound bytes page. There will definitely be at least a few recordings on there I'm sure you'll recognize!
Till next time-
E
