Quote:
Originally Posted by
polarhase
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After listening to your songs - if you do have the possibility to give the rode TF-5 a try - they're SDC but really nice and warm that might flatter to the tone of your voice. Excellent tools for acoustic guitar and percussion / OH as well. As Progger suggested the Beyer 930s, i've used both of them side by side and while i think the 930 might give the more accurate response, i suspect you might like what the TF does.
Independent of mic choice:
As has been stated, that the room is just as or maybe even more important. Kind of like the body of your guitar, while the mic were your strings. If that analogy is allowed.
With sibilants, these high frequencies just are much more projecting than the rest of the range of our voices. So the mic that on its own sounds right on the sibilants might lack clarity/definition/"air" in any other vocal expression. Therefor deessing imho is just the way to go. Eventually, a deesser is just a compressor triggered by a sidechained signal of your voice with exaggerated (eq-ed in) sibilants. This can be fully automated once carefully set and forget.
Further helping could be adding a parallel compression path with pushed lows and air bands. This realises a dynamic eq / automatic loudness effect that's pleasing to our natural hearing. Instead of ducking from above it builds a fundament from below that allows you to become very soft and quiet and even whisper with then so to say automatically increased bass and air. Naturally, the sibilant frequencies tend to be harsh in high volumes but between nice and needed in low volumes and the same is true for the low end of the range, so finding nice settings for a p.c. path might benefit to a controlled yet natural and open sounding voice and help with less harshness on louder sibilants. Maybe you already added this in your mixdown.
Nice work btw, regards
Thanks for your comments and listening to the songs. I just want to reiterate for the benefice of the thread that I did buy my microphone and I settled on the Flea 47 Next. I'vs been tracking a little with it these past 2 weeks. And I really like it so far. It does have a good bit of air around the 10khz area but it's quite reasonable and deals much better with sibilance than my other condensers. Obviously my R84 has less sibilance but it also lacks in the «detail/definition/sheen» that condensers have.
For what it's worth, has long as the sibilance is not annoying when I sing in the mic, it's fine on that matter. I know I can easily take care of it in the mix anyway. I do this with a combination of manual leveling on the wave file, a de-eesser and comping the best takes.
I also find if just track with a slight eq cut at 7200hz it's already almost perfect.
So far I really like the Flea 47 for vocals. It's really well balanced across the frequencies and without any eq it already sits pretty well in the rough mix as I track other stuff along the voice. It sounds pretty much mix ready for my type of sound. I could see some would like more top end but I don't and I think there is already plenty enough in the 10khz. It's far from a dark microphone.
Also, the bass is really nice sounding with some warm and pleasant low mids and the low end is really soft and contained. The proximity effect is just right and it helps to control the amount of bass you want and also the volume when you sing lower notes. I just approach the mic for these notes. It's not bass heavy - a quick comparison with the Aston Spirit and the Aston has a much bigger bottom end and you can't approch the mic too much because it's overpowering.