Recording - June 2015 - 61

The published chart doesn't show the mic's response at 90°, but experience has
taught me that it's pretty similar to the response on axis (0°). That's unusual in a
large-diaphragm mic; somehow the engineers at Gefell managed an end run
around the laws of physics. It was a useful end run for this session, since it meant
that any leakage from the banjo wouldn't pick up colorations from the vocal mic's
off-axis response.
As it turned out, I needn't have worried. Will's banjo is loud, all right, but like
many instruments with resonators attached, it's also very directional. Will sits with
the instrument pointing slightly to the right; since his vocal mic was placed a little
to his left, pointing at his cheek, the beam of the banjo's sound went out into the
room, away from the vocal mic.
Placing the mic a little to the left of Will's mouth had another serendipitously
good result. Over years of using the M930 I've learned that if it's pointed directly at a singer's mouth, and the singer has any tendency toward vocal sibilance,
the M930's high-end rise will give you a recording with laser-sharp sssibilance
that will sssssslice your ear off. But rotate the M930 just a couple of degrees,
and/or move the vocalist so his/her mouth isn't pointed 100% toward the mic,
and the excess sibilance goes away, leaving a response that suits voices (especially male voices) very nicely. I've found this to be true for many other largediaphragm condenser mics as well.
I used another M930 on the tenor banjo. Will also plays a variety of other instruments, including nylon-strung guitar and various mandolins. The session was openended; I knew we'd work on this piece, and one other, but beyond that the sky was
the limit. I wanted to use a microphone that could do equal justice to Will's guitar
as well as his banjo, and would let him switch instruments without my having to
change microphones. That's useful when you can get away with it, as it lets the session flow without interruption, which is good for the musicians' psyches.

What if there had been excessive leakage
from the banjo into Will's vocal mic? I was
prepared for that possibility; in my mic suitcase I'd brought an Electro-Voice RE16. That's
a dynamic mic with a good built-in pop filter
(its frequency response is shown in Figure 4).
That response is close enough to the M930's
that I anticipated it also would sound good on
Will's voice, but the crucial factor that made
me bring the RE16 was the fact that it's hypercardioid-as such, it has better rejection at
90° than the cardioid M930. Like the M930,
though, it has 90° response that's a pretty
close match to its on-axis response, meaning
that any leakage that happened would
remain uncolored by off-axis oddities. In the
end, though, I didn't need the RE16, and it
stayed in the suitcase.
Shlomo's bass amp
As I usually do with electric instruments, I
miked the speaker of Shlomo's GallienKrueger bass amp. (To be strictly accurate, I
miked the left-hand speaker - this amp has
two.) I placed the mic halfway between the
center of the speaker cone and the edge; in
that position the mic picks up a little dirt from
the cone. To me, the sound of an electric guitar or bass includes that dirt, and that's where
I aim the microphone almost any time I'm
recording an amplifier. The microphone I used
was an Electro-Voice RE200, a transformerless
condenser mic with a medium-sized
diaphragm (about 3/4" in diameter); its frequency response curve is shown in Figure 5.

4
3

There was another attraction to using the M930 on the loud tenor banjo. The
M930 is a transformerless condenser, and it can take high volume levels with
aplomb (it's one of the few condenser mics I've ever successfully used inside a kick
drum). Having sat in front of Will's banjo on occasion, I knew the M930's high
SPL capability would come in handy.
Can you tell I like these microphones? After I reviewed a pair for the magazine
(Recording, March 2004), I put myself in hock and bought them; since then
they've been my "money" microphones, at the center of many a session. Every
engineer has favorite mics that he or she pulls out first; having such favorites, and
knowing well how they perform, is a vital part of an engineer's cumulative expertise. When you learn what a mic does well and how it behaves, it becomes a part
of your mental mic closet; a well-understood mic, whether expensive or more
affordable, never becomes obsolete!
I placed the M930 facing the head of the banjo, a little below the strings. I've
found by experience that it's not usually a good idea to mike the exact center of a
banjo head (likewise a drum head; the structures are essentially the same). Besides,
placing the mic below the strings meant I wouldn't be recording excessive pick noise.
One quirk arose from using the same model mic on Will's voice and instrument:
the similar responses meant there was some overlap in the way the two sources
sounded, with a slight decrease in vocal intelligibility. I'll tell you how I solved that
problem in the article on equalizers, a few months from now.

As you can see, the RE200's response
curve looks a lot different from those we've
encountered thus far: it has prominent narrow
peaks at 5 kHz and 7 kHz, climbing 4 dB
and 5.8 dB above zero respectively. In fact,
the response curve is, if anything, more irregular than it appears at first glance, because
Electro-Voice chose not to follow an industry
convention when they published this curve.
It's standard to display frequency levels
with reference to the device's response at 1
kHz; in most published response curves,
therefore, the graph will read "0 dB" at 1kHz.
In the RE200's published curve, however, 1
kHz falls at about 1.9 dB below zero, meaning that any frequencies other than 1 kHz
should have a +1.9dB "fudge factor" added.
That means that the peaks at 5 kHz and 7
kHz actually rise to about +5.9 dB and +7.7
dB, respectively. Those are some fiercely
bright peaks, and they sound it!
RECORDING June 2015

Recording - June 2015

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