Brief Summary
Anyone who is looking for definitive answers on equipment choice along the lines of “what is the best X?” is missing the point. Absolutes rarely apply in audio.
Going Deeper
We’ve never had as much choice as we do today, particularly when it comes to gear. I remember when Rode launched the NT2 condenser mic in the mid 90s. It’s hard to appreciate now just how many fewer choices were available to you if you wanted a condenser mic for your project studio and didn’t want to pay pro prices for a European mic. Many of us were using Tandy PZMs and AKG C1000’s because we couldn't afford a 414 or similar. That Rode mic was an important part of something we’re very used to now. Breadth of choice.
The same goes for monitors, lots of people were using hifi speakers, processing was strictly hardware and if present, computers were handling MIDI only. Of course DAWs and plugins changed everything, and continue to do so but the sheer choice available in hardware today is also worth mentioning as there are just so many alternatives. So whereas 30 years ago I could meaningfully have answered the question ‘what’s the best X’, given some idea of the budget available there were probably a handful of products to choose from. It’s just not like that now.
This is where you might expect me to say that this is counterproductive. If we have endless choices, how can we ever make a decision? Actually I think choice is great.
What Equipment Should I Use?
I had a vocalist visit the studio yesterday to track some harmonies. It was Anna’s second visit. Brief back-story, she was working with a drum and bass producer. As part of the collaboration he’d written the track and she’d written the lyrics and a melody, which she was coming to me to get recorded. As a tracking task it was about as simple as it gets.
When it came to choosing what to record with, I’d asked what DAW the producer was using and when it came back that he was using Ableton Live I decided to use Pro Tools as I don’t have, and definitely don’t know, Ableton. If he had been using Studio One or Logic I could have shared the session with him but to answer the question what’s the best DAW? In this case, for me, it was Pro Tools. I can always share stems of premixed leads and harmonies.
This DAW choice isn’t just because of my familiarity with Pro Tools, though that has a lot to do with it. It’s also because it opens up extra tracking possibilities. I’d never tracked this singer before, this is an ideal case for deferring mic choice until after she’d left so I chose to track using a Townsend Sphere L22. If I was tracking into a DAW other than Pro Tools I could have tracked through the Sphere plugin using my UA Apollo, with near zero latency. However as I was using Pro Tools I could use my Carbon, running the Sphere plugin as an AAX DSP plugin and review a few mic choices later.
With vocals triple-tracked and a handful of ad libs on the timeline we left it for a couple of weeks. She had a rough mix with some tuning and general tidying-up which she and the producer could review. Yesterday she returned for a harmonies session.
The interesting thing is that I used completely different gear to record the second session, and not because I didn’t like the first choice. For the first tracking session I used the L22 with its default U47. It sounded great, it sounds like a U47 after all. I tried the C12 model and the top end sounded lovely, I tried the C800G because I thought it might sound a bit more hi-fi, Lovely again but I went with the U47. Three choices, all good ones.
On the return visit she had brought a friend along who was going to help her with choosing and freestyling a few harmonies. Although he wasn’t the producer, in the traditional sense, he was kind of fulfilling that role. He was on the sofa behind me, directing the performance and giving feedback of what was good and what didn’t work. Luckily he was good at it.
Because of this I decided not to use the Carbon. That stays in a 3U flightcase as I regularly use it away from the studio for tracking sessions. My studio is a converted garage at my house and not suitable for band tracking, actually until I finish building it it’s questionable whether it’s suitable for tracking vocals. My regular interface in the studio these days is the Mbox Studio, which I’m favouring because of its monitor controller features and bluetooth. With a three way discussion about lines and arrangement I took the path of least resistance and went with that so we could review takes via the monitors. For harmonies, and because I now knew Anna’s voice I was happy to go with my Neumann TLM 103, which incidentally is now an option in the new Universal Audio version of the Sphere Plugin. No need for the Sphere plugin to monitor through. Using the Mbox control software to access the DSP mixer I could easily set up a couple of headphone mixes with some confidence reverb and with Pro Tools ARA Melodyne it was simple to experiment with alternative harmony ideas. I could probably have got better results with Syncho Arts RePitch but the speed of the ARA workflow was more important here.
The point I’m making is that even for the same vocalist on the same track there wasn’t a ‘right’ choice when it came to which mic or even which interface to use.
Given the breadth of choice out there today, I find it interesting how opinions gather around a few pieces of equipment which receive all the attention, and because they receive all the attention they gather yet more and more attention in a feedback loop of, occasionally binary, opinions: “I think the SM7 is best’. “I prefer the RE20”. “How dare you say the SM7 is bad”. I’m sure you’ve seen similar exchanges online…
So, the SM7 isn’t the best, and Pro Q 3 isn’t the best, and Macs aren’t the best. Not because they aren’t good, but because there isn’t any such thing as ‘best’. Absolutism is ridiculous. It depends on who you are and what you do. Actually it depends on what you are doing at the time. Why did I swap from the Sphere to the TLM 103? Not because the Sphere didn’t sound good. Because the TLM 103 also sounded good and it was more suitable for that particular task.