BOLT FROM THE BLUE
Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, Kylee Swenson Remix Editor
Like a lot of people who have produced music over the years, I have craved better equipment to make a better sound. It's not very girlish of me, but upgrading gear used to seem so important to me that I would wear sweaters with holes in them instead of buying new clothes. Rather than throwing out old makeup, I would use the same mascara until it got clumpy and dry. This may not mean much to the 90-percent-plus male readership of Remix (seriously ladies, where are you?). But my guess is that all the guys out there make similar sacrifices, like borrowing old video games from friends and eating Ramen noodle soup for days on end.
At any rate, I saved up for better mics and preamps, and one day, I bought a microphone that cost me a cool $1,500. I can't explain my excitement. It was something I always wanted and always assumed was the missing link. When I got the mic, it was my baby. It had a pretty, stained wooden box and a shockmount so solid that it could be run over by a Mack truck and still function. I loved that mic. I really loved it.
I recorded with it a bunch. And then I recorded with it for real, for my band's next album. While working with outside producers (check out www.rondobrothers.com) for the first time, everyone naturally assumed that my masterfully constructed large-diaphragm mic, a superexpensive preamp and industry-standard compressor were the best way to go. We recorded three songs with that signal chain.
Then we realized that the combination of my voice and that mic… sucked. And I felt like an idiot. Here was an expensive mic that was created to complement female voices, and I still believe that to be the case. It just didn't really work with mine. It was like being smitten with someone who, on paper, is everything you could dream of, only to realize that he/she is terribly incompatible with you. I wanted to go outside and throw rocks at neighbors' windows when I realized this.
But it was a good lesson. We went back to the more modest Røde NT2 mic we've been taking for granted for many years, and then I began to understand what a perfect relationship my voice had with it. So there it is: It's about relationships between things, not money. Our NT2, Grace Design Model 101 preamp and Summit Audio TLA-50 Tube Leveler seem to work for me. (Although a Røde NT1 was also good, a Sennheiser MD 421 ended up being cool for choruses, and the aforementioned superexpensive mic even ended up working on a couple of parts.) Granted, other — and more expensive — mic chains could be better. I obviously haven't had the time or luxury to try everything out there yet. But several wrong and a few right choices led us here. So my advice to those of you wearing holey sweaters and playing old, borrowed video games is this: Borrow gear. Try out a lot of different stuff. Then, buy the things that sound best to your ears — not necessarily the most expensive equipment — and feel good about it.
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