Chapter 4 Tutorial: Microphone Types

In order to deal with the wide range of musical, acoustic, and situational circumstances that might come your way (not to mention your own personal taste), a large number of mic types, styles, and designs are available for use as "sonic tools." Because the particular sonic characteristics of a mic might be best suited to a specific range of applications, engineers can use their artistic talents to get the best possible sound from an acoustic source by carefully choosing the mic or series of mics that fit the specific pickup application at hand.

In audio production, three microphone transducer types are used:

Do It Yourself Tutorial: Mic Types
  1. Download the micTypes.ZIP file, which contains the four mp3 audio files for this tutorial. Or listen to the files by clicking on the links below.
  2. If you’d like to Do-It-Yourself, then...
  3. Pull out several mics from each operating type and plug them in (if you don’t have several types, maybe a friend has a few you can borrow). Try each one on an instrument and/or vocal. Are the differences between operating types more noticeable than between models in the same family?

Sound files courtesy of ArtistPro/CoursePTR, courseptr.com/artistpro (Professional Microphone Techniques, David Miles Huber & Philip Williams)