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Mighty mikes

Posted on 21 Sep 2005 at 17:01

Brian Heywood looks at cost-effective ways of capturing the sound of music safely onto your computer's hard disk

Like most microphones used in professional studios, the DKR displays a cardioid (heart-shaped) response pattern, which means it's most sensitive from the front, less so at the sides and least sensitive to sound coming from the rear; in other words, it's highly directional to the front. This is in sharp contrast to many computer and tie-clip microphones that usually display an omni response pattern - they're equally sensitive to sound coming from any direction. This allows you to position the MXL DRK so that your computer sits in the dead area behind it, to reduce interference from fan and disk noise.

At just under £90, the DRK won't break your bank balance. See www.etcetera.co.uk for more details.

Superlux Drum Kit set

Another set of budget microphones I've been using recently are from the Chinese company Superlux. These microphones have been creating quite a buzz in the music industry, as they're incredibly cheap for the quality they deliver. My first foray into the Superlux range was when I bought two of its small-diaphragm condenser models - the PRA-268A - to use as overheads when recording drums. At less than £40 each, I felt I couldn't really lose on the deal, considering that the Sennheiser equivalents (the E664) cost more than £180 each from my usual supplier. The Superlux turned out to be an excellent microphone, so I checked out the rest of the range and found that they all had a good reputation.

One of the problems with recording a drum kit is that you need a lot of microphones, especially as the drummers I work with tend to go overboard with the tom-toms. I already had good bass and snare drum microphones - Sennheiser E602 and E604 - and with my new Superlux overheads I only needed to sort out the tom-tom microphones. Ideally, these should be well-matched dynamic microphones to give a consistent sound across the kit, and since I needed a minimum of four it can get quite expensive.

Superlux sells various microphone sets and I was hoping to get hold of the DRK-A5, which contains four PRA-228A tom microphones and a PRA-218A bass drum microphone (which I didn't really need). However, the A5 set was unavailable due to the popularity of the brand; I therefore plumped for the DRK-A4, which has only three tom microphones and a single bass drum one. This turned out to be an ideal choice, since the bass microphone has a similar frequency characteristic to the smaller tom microphones, making it ideal for use on the low-floor tom.

The Superlux units all have a hyper-cardioid pickup pattern that makes them even more directional than the DRK, which again makes them ideal for drum-kit applications thanks to their better rejection of 'off axis' sound from the rest of the kit. Actually, you don't have to use these microphones just for drums: you can use them for other instruments, and they're especially suitable for recording brass and reed instruments.

These microphones are incredible value at just under £60 for the entire A4 set. I bought mine from www.makingwavesaudio.com, whose staff were both knowledgeable and very helpful.

Open-Source Audacity

In years gone by, when someone was just starting to get into audio editing, I'd recommend the shareware version of Cool Edit since it was a free but still a highly functional software package with a well-defined upgrade path. While the shareware version had a limited feature set compared to the retail version, it was done in such a way that you could try out all the features over a period of time. In short, it was a great example of the shareware concept, as well as being a damn good audio editor.