I had a hallmark moment this week. No, not a Hallmark moment, but one which I didn’t think would ever happen. You see, Scott Siders and I were working in my recording studio Monday night, getting it all set back up to start work recording the next 404 Not Found studio CD. We got enough signal path wired up to start tuning the settings on the pre-amp and compressor for the main studio mic, my Rode NT1 that lives in the Whisper Room. Well, I had Scott in there babbling away while I was tweaking knobs and I just couldn’t get things to sound like I wanted them. We tried for probably an hour, but there was always something not-quite-right. It sounded like some kind of phase cancelation problem, almost like a phaser or flanger effect, but steady with no cycle to it.
Finally, on a lark I said, “OK, let’s plug in a different mic and see how it sounds.” So we plugged in my new Shure SM58S, and it sounded just right. The weirdness we’d both been hearing before suddenly went away. I think what has happened is that we’ve been playing with the live setup so much for the past several months, that our ears got used to the way Scott’s voice sounds through an SM58 (I’ve been borrowing one from Byron for our live setup, but finally got my own – one with a switch – as a Christmas gift to myself). When we went back to the NT1, which we’d used in the studio for the past couple years, it just didn’t sound right.
So, yesterday I took down the NT1 and replaced it with the SM58S in the Whisper Room. We’ll use that as our primary voice mic from here on. I’ve read in the past about people having a strong preference of one microphone over another – and I even read somewhere that Bono (from U2) will only use Shure SM58’s even in the studio – but I have never until now experienced it for myself. And the strange thing is that the NT1 has better specs and certainly costs a lot more than the SM58. But Scott and I both like the way the SM58 sounds, so we’ll stick with that.
I also removed the boom stand and the spit screen for the NT1, and just put the SM58 on a very basic single rod mic stand in its place. It sure makes things less crowded in the Whisper Room that way. Scott said he thinks he can stand to spend all day in there now. We’ll see! We also installed a big fluorescent AC light fixture in there, to replace the tiny one that used to be in there. So now there’s a lot more light to read by.