Chapters Five & Six: Mics and Mic Placement - Posted on 2017-01-06 by Sonya Glaessner

I was fortunate enough to gain hands on experience working with different mics in my last observation. We were in the Mezzanine, being led by the engineer Shaylene. Shaylene asked us to pick out the mics we would use on an acoustic guitar, and on vocals. For the acoustic guitar we chose the Sennheiser MD 421, a dynamic microphone that sounds good on just about anything. For vocals, we went with the Shure SM7B. While it isn't always the first choice for vocals, we wanted to experiment with the mic used for Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' album. We recorded the acoustic guitar first, placing the mic close enough to the instrument to get a full body sound. Vocals were recorded over the guitar track in the vocal booth. Our time in the space was limited so the quality of the recording wasn't as strong as it could have been. We didn't have the ability to test a few different mics, or see if there were better options for the sound we were trying to achieve. I also believe our session would have turned out far more satisfactory had we actually settled on the sound we were going for. The importance of time and planning became very clear to me while engaging in this process. Because we are students, we are fortunate enough to get to work within this space for free. However, if we had been with a client, they are paying 100+ dollars and hour for their studio time. They want to come in knowing their engineer, or producer, has a solid plan of attack when approaching their project. It was a definite learning experience and I look forward to getting back into the studio.