Sir Needs To Mixalot

Shure brought out the SM7 in 1973 as a broadcast mic. A decade later Bruce Swedien was using one on most of Michael Jackson’s lead vocals, including “Billie Jean” and “The Way You Make Me Feel.” He told Sound On Sound the choice raised some eyebrows at the time. He owned six of them.

The part worth stealing is less about the mic and more about the habit. Swedien said he used the same mic and the same preamp for Jackson’s vocals throughout the album. Every song was sung into one chain, so the voice sounds like the same person in the same room from the first track to the last. On a self-recorded EP, that kind of consistency usually matters more than which mic you buy.

The SM7 is on plenty of other records too. Bruce Dickinson on The Number of the Beast, Anthony Kiedis on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and Jack White’s vocals from Icky Thump on. The current model is the SM7B. Close relative, not the identical early-’80s mic.

Tracking with one

It’s a quiet mic and it needs a lot of clean gain, somewhere around 60 dB for a normal singer, which is why people pair it with a Cloudlifter or another inline booster. Sing close. It forgives a bad room better than most condensers, which is probably how podcasters found it.

Watch and read

• Sound On Sound: Bruce Swedien: Recording Michael Jackson
• MusicRadar: Swedien on the making of Thriller, track by track
• Reverb: Swedien on how he captured Jackson’s voice
• YouTube: Bruce Swedien on vocal mic placement
• Wikipedia: Shure SM7

Highland Dynamics is Bryce Gonzales in Los Angeles. Before this he built the Lisson Grove AR-1. The BG2 is a mono, all-tube variable-mu compressor, transformer-balanced and wired point to point.

It has two feedback modes. “British” is the cleaner one and “American” adds more harmonics. There’s also a line-amp mode for when you just want to run something through the tubes and transformers without compressing it.

Sound On Sound’s review called it astoundingly good on vocals. John Vanderslice, who runs Tiny Telephone in the Bay Area, told Vintage King they keep a BG1 and a BG2 in both rooms. That’s a decent endorsement from a place that has tracked a lot of indie records.

On a vocal

Set it so the loudest lines get three or four dB of reduction and then leave it alone. Variable-mu compression gets gentler as the signal drops, so the quiet lines barely get touched. Try both modes on the same take before you decide.

Watch and read

• Sound On Sound: Highland Dynamics BG2 review
• Tape Op: BG2 review
• Vintage King: Highland Dynamics BG2

The RCA 44 is the mic you picture when you picture 1940s radio. It’s a figure-8 ribbon, and when Bing Crosby leaned in close, the proximity effect gave him the warm, intimate low end that became crooning. Frank Sinatra sang into them early on. Les Paul used a 44-BX when he recorded “How High the Moon” in 1951.

RCA stopped making them a long time ago. AEA, in Pasadena, started servicing RCA ribbons in 1976, and by 1998 it could make every part of a 44 itself. That became the R44C, a replica of the 1936–38 44-BX. Les Paul told AEA’s Wes Dooley it was his favorite mic, and Eddie Van Halen bought a pair to record drums in stereo.

Singing into one

Distance is the tone control. Close in, you get the low-end bloom. Step back a foot and it thins out and the room comes in. Because it’s a figure-8, the back hears just as well as the front, so think about what’s behind it. Give it a preamp with a lot of clean gain.

Watch and read

• AEA: Our story
• AEA: The last 20 years of the R44
• Vintage King: The RCA 44