New toys

I just received delivery of some new audio goodies today.

The theatre thing with Val is coming along really well. But the other day when Val was talking to one of the venues we are going to perform at, they asked us what our requirements were. Val went through the list until he got to my guitar, which is a had made Spanish classical guitar. No pickup, no nothing. Just wood, glue and strings. Val said "We'll need a condenser mic for the classical guitar."

The guy apparently went silent. He didn't know what a condenser mic was. Then Val said "We'll need phantom power for it to operate". Again, the guy fell silent. Val thought his mobile phone had poor reception. But it was fine. The sound guy at the venue had no clue what he was on about.

Sad part is, you'd expect a sound engineer to know. I told Val I'm possibly buying my own condenser mic and a nice mic pre amp anyway. So, that's exactly what I've done.

Bought one of these.


It's a valve mic pre amp, but you can use it for musical instruments. ART makes some good stuff but this is cheap and I got in on Ebay with next day delivery.

The other toy I got to match is the ART M-ONE Condenser mic.


Now, I was advised that what I needed was a small diaphragm condenser mic and a mic preamp with a built-in compressor. I didn't want to complicate things with compressors and what not. The sound guys can take care of that. I also went against the advice of the small diaphragm and got a large diaphragm mic instead. I did this because there seemed to be more people recording with the larger ones than the smaller ones. Plus, there were more larger ones available in stock.

The main difference between the small diaphragm mics and the large ones is the response time of each one. The smaller ones respond better to changes in sound. If that's the case, so be it. But most recordings are done with large condenser mics and I'll just follow what works in practice, ignore the theory and do things the way I've always done it, by the seat of my pants.

The part that sucks about my new purchases is that I can't plug it in because I didn't think to buy a cable. DUH! And I also didn't buy a mic stand.

The great part about all this is that the mic is worth about 3 times what I paid for it. And the preamp was had for about $50 off the normal price. In the end saving myself about $300 if I walked into a local music shop.