Microphones

This self portrait/documentation of my own daily rhythms has involved a lot of very quiet sound sources: unscrewing a Moka pot, the ticking of a mechanical stopwatch, playing a quiet guitar very softly, gentle breathing, clothes brushing together. I started off using an AKG p40 – a large diaphragm condenser mic, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the clarity in the top end or the ability to pickup supremely quiet nuances in the sound (I’m not too sure if there’s a name for this characteristic of mics? For example, dynamic mics have a low ability to do this, but the larger diaphragm condensers often are very good at it, and the more modern AKG C414’s that I have access to on campus can sometimes even pick up super low freq rumble from road noise outside the building, completely inaudible to my own ears). I was looking for something more akin to the ASMR tropes of very present top end and a strong, weighty proximity effect. I borrowed a friend’s Sontronics Orpheus microphone for the mid channel of my M/S recording, and that was exactly what I was after – it was delicate and precise, significantly more clear with more ‘resolution’ (I know that it isn’t actually providing more resolution in the technical sense of the word) in the top end, with a less mid-focused sound than the P420. It improved my recordings greatly.

Preamps

I have two types of preamps available to me – those that are built into my desk (a 90s-ish Soundcraft live console) and those built into my interface (a Behringer 10/in 10/out interface). I had noticed that the Behringer pre’s were less noisy and more clear than the Soundcraft ones, but due to the routing of my studio I am running mics through the console into the interface into Protools. Unsure of whether the console would add undesirable noise in certain circumstances, I did some experiments with different amounts of amplification from both preamps and bypassing one or the other to see if there was a balance between the two that suits these types of quiet sources the best, and found that running the console at unity and then doing all of my amplification within the interface worked the best. I found it quite interesting that the console performed well with mic level signals running through its buses, not adding very much noise at all – I would have expected the console to run optimally with amplified signals, but it seems that the worst of the noise comes from pushing the preamps to their limits, and is not inherent to the circuitry.