Acoustics for pop music, in a recording studio like environment, is basically a misnomer. You don't need any stupid acoustical junk. Your room already has a nice sound to it. Nice wood and brick. Reasonable diffusion throughout the room. So don't waste your money on stupid acoustic foam or even bass traps. Not necessary. Completely superfluous.
Your current microphone sounds quite nice. I think it actually complements your voice since you don't really like to breathe much? You don't also have Erectile Dysfunction too? Because it certainly sounds that way? Guess you didn't sing in the school choir either? I mean don't you want to sound like a man? You sound like a kid crying on your mother's shoulder? No guts? No glory. So let's try it with some more air, a little more guttural and try to sing in chest voice not head tone. Girls sing in head tone because that's all they can do. A guy can get it down with chest tonality. So while it is a sweet and somber song, you still have to sing it as a man and not as a child/kid. Your voice has already changed, so you need to explore what it's actually capable of doing. This requires support. This requires proper breathing. Your singing everything on stale available air, in your lungs. That's not enough.
Choosing any other microphone similar to the one you are currently using, is really not a smart move. It's simply a lateral move to something that will be very similar to what you already have. A microphone that can provide some more guts would be the SHURE SM58, with an additional foam pop filter on top of the metal ball. This microphone actually outperforms what you are currently using. It's also what you should be using unamplified electric guitars, drums, even keyboard instrument amplifiers. This is where you can take advantage of your acoustics in your room. So not only can you take a keyboard from the DI outputs, you can mix it with the feed from an instrument amplifier with a microphone, for an extra level of acoustics.
The Pod line of equipment is really quite good, first rate. If you want one of those classic hit making preamplifiers, that's going to set you back from between 300+ dollars to more than $1500 for a single channel preamp. And there's not too many that I would recommend. Seventh Circle, makes some nice API/Neve style kits in that $300 region. Warm Audio, also offers similar cloned API/Neve style preamps. These all have input and output transformer coupling along with discrete transistor circuitry. Nothing else much compares. Don't bother with any tube nonsense.
The Neumann TLM-102, is one hell of a beautiful sounding microphone. Everything they make sounds gorgeous. That coupled with a transformer coupled all discrete transistor preamp, is a hit winning sound. And what you've heard actually on countless hits since the late 1960s. TLM-103 is also a great sounding microphone. But Rode? Come on now! Certainly not a improvement nor a step in the right direction. A waste of your money. MXL is not much different.
While at the same time, condenser microphones sound like condenser microphones and dynamic microphones don't but can. An SM58 (57 is the same without the metal ball), slightly restricted bandwidth, can actually improve your recording. It gets rid of a lot of low-frequency noise. It's quite insensitive to higher frequency noises. And it ignores a lot of acoustic aberrations in nonideal rooms. You certainly don't need any microphone that goes beyond 17,000 Hz, as most online music downloads such as MP3's only go out to 15,000 Hz, at 128 kb per second, 16-bit. The same with FM radio. Television used to be the same, until it went digital. BFD! Watch any televised rock 'n roll event and what do you see everybody singing into? And how does it sound to you? Right. Fantastic. And it's a $100 microphone. Plug that $100 microphone into a nice transformer coupled all transistor microphone preamp and magic happens, just like that. But that also assumes that you understand how that preamp can color your sound, just by adjusting its gain trim settings. For a smooth vocal sound, you will be pad off on the preamp with the gain up. For a more open and slightly more aggressive sound, you will be pad on, with the gain cranked up even more. And ZAP! It will sound unbelievable! And you can't get this from cheap or IC chip style preamps.
I find that most inexpensive condenser microphones, with inexpensive, transformer less preamps, get metallic sounding and crispy thin. And that only accentuates everything that we don't like about PCM digital recording. Though one might consider it when recording symphonic, orchestral, operatic work? Where everyone wants color, out the window. Go figure? WTF with that? Not me. Not what I go for. Half the time, you don't even need any equalization, when you choose and position correctly, the right microphone. Equalizers do more to to harm recordings, when it is not implemented correctly. I don't grab for an equalizer until I changed microphones. Change the positioning of microphones. Only then, might I add or subtract some equalization. Just to get the vocal to complement and sit properly in the mix. That's also where you add some dynamic range compression and/or limiting. Then some downward expansion to electronically remove room acoustics, breaths, other extraneous background noises, that maybe increased, exaggerated and accentuated, with the use of dynamic range compression and/or limiting. The downward expansion requires that you set, very carefully, a proper threshold, beneath the lowest level vocal range. And you don't need much more than say, 10-20 DB. This is the difference between downward expansion and gating. Gates sound relatively unnatural on vocals. You keep hearing this door opening and then slamming shut. And that will detract from the vocal. We're downward expansion is much smoother sounding and can be adjusted to only downward expand to a preset range such as 10 DB, 15 DB, 20 DB and not off. It also cleans up residual preamplifier and amplifier noise. And that's how ya get a clean vocal without the room boom.
The Rumba is completely different.
Mx. Remy Ann David
