Hi Kevin and others. The Rode NT1 is a awesome mic and I will recommend it any day as a studio condenser for doing vocals or acoustic instruments like guitars, violens or piano. However kevin, the NT2 is the one with the pad and patern switching and my opinion if you can afford the $100 or so more I'd rather go for the NT2 as it esentially sounds the same as the NT1 but with the aditional pick up paterns and pad. As for your room, it's highly recommended to get some room treetment especially if you're going to do vocals with condenser mics because they are very sensitive and the quietest condenser mic in the world won't help anything if you have a loud noisy room. As said you can do a lot of stuff DIY style without spending a lot of money on a pro person or company to do it for you but if you have the budget it is obviously better to get in the pros. There's a lot of stuff on the net about DIY acoustics and you can get verry far by doing some reading and by experementing a little with different things. You can make a lot of improvements by using blankets, carpet, cardboard boxes, spunge/phome etc. used in the rite ways and placed rite. For serious studio vocals I'd always recommend condenser mics like the Rode NT1 and NT2 mentioned above and as also mentioned the NT2 can switch to omni directional to pick up people singing in a group or a string section etc. If you really want to use dynamic mics you can get verry far with something like the SM58, a lot of studio engineers would consider dynamic mics for vocal recording a big no, no but it can be done, for example U2's Bonno only records vocals with his SM58. Mics really depends a lot on your budget and needs, I've mentioned the Rode mics, AKG has awesome vocal mics at the budget end starting at the c1000 going up to the c414 etc and you can also look at shure, a lot of people only see shure mics as live mics but they have awesome studio mics in fact the SM in SM58 actually stands for studio microphone. Dynamic as said look at the SM58 and condenser wise the beta87 is awesome for recording and also the KSM109. As you probably know by now the ideal situation would be to keep your equipment like computer and hard drive in one room and record in another but if not possible you can do it in one room, as mentioned by use of longer cables distance the mic and your computer as far away from each other as possible. In sted of covering your computer with something like a blanket a good idea is just to put a barryer between thee computer and the mic, you can do this with a acoustic pannel or something as simple as a blanket hanged between 2 mic stands can also do the trick. On Monday, May 7, 2012 11:39:11 PM UTC+2, Nick Gawronski wrote:
> Hi, I am trying to find some good quality microphones as the ones that I > have when connected to my digi 003 I hear lots of background humming > from my external drive and sounds like cars driving by. I am mainly for > starting going to be recordings of friends of mine and want both > microphones that can capture only what is directly in front of them and > some microphones to capture all of the room like for a small group > performance where I want all of the voices but not lots of background > noise going threw the microphones. My current microphones don't require > any phantom power in order to work and when I have tried putting them > around the room the people have to talk rather loud in order to be heard > or it sounds like they are far away. What types of microphones work > well with the digi 003 for both of these setups I don't mind getting > better quality microphones as some of these current ones go back years? > Nick Gawronski >
