When you build your first home music studio, you may want to get a condenser microphone for recording your vocals. You might even want to look at tube ones.
These devices can appear quite impressive – they're massive, solid, and attached to a suspension mount – and they say there's nothing better for recording vocals than condenser microphones.
With dynamic microphones, people will often say that they were only created for stage work, that they have a narrow frequency range, problems with sound detailing and non-flatter frequency response. There’s the belief that you need to shout into a dynamic microphone in the studio because it has less sensitivity.
For the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume that most often, when we’re talking about people creating the first home studio in their lives, we’re talking about young people. Typically, young people will have a very limited budget for acquiring the minimum functional set of music equipment needed to get started. (By the way, it's important to note that often the cost of soundproofing a room isn’t properly factored into one’s budget. It's not exactly cheap.)
Let’s say you’re lucky enough to live in a standalone house in a very quiet suburban area. Great! But what if your suburb is an active one? Full of flowing traffic? Or what if you live in the middle of a city. Not a private house, but in an apartment? Things start to get dicier.
Imagine that you've prepared everything for recording some vocals with a condenser microphone. You’ve locked the cat in the bathroom and asked your family members not to make noise or to just leave to go see a movie or do some shopping or whatever. You’ve shut the windows tight and turned off all the humming electrical appliances. You’ve even temporarily removed the cooling fan from your computer.
And, yet, on the recording you’re suddenly hearing crickets or cicadas chirping in the background. Sparrows chattering. Cars roaring. The angry cat you locked in the bathroom digging nearby. You also hear the backing track leaking into the recording from your headphones, and, during the session, your chair creaked, even though you thought you were sitting as still as you could.
This is what a condenser microphone picks up in an unprepared room, even with cardioid directionality.
A condenser microphone is not a brain; it hears absolutely everything within the reach of its sensitivity, including noise. It helps your computer record these noises along with your voice or the voice of the artist you’re working with.
That’s not to say that a dynamic microphone hears less noise. It still captures it well, even with a cheap microphone (let’s say about $40).
But here's the difference: the dynamic microphone's high sensitivity area is located very close to the diaphragm — literally a few inches away. Everything that happens more than a foot or two away, the dynamic device hears much worse.
This feature with a dynamic microphone might prove quite useful if the recording is being made in a first timer’s home studio, which, let’s be honest here, means we’re pretty much talking about someone’s bedroom (or maybe a guest bedroom if you’re lucky). In a bedroom, we’re going to have a really tough time trying to remove extraneous noise. But if it’s only slightly mixing in with the useful audio signal then this is almost not even a problem. We can cut out the noise during pauses in the recording, and, in the context of the overall mix, it will likely go unnoticed.
For this example, let's take a look at the legendary dynamic microphone Shure SM58, with its frequency range from 15 Hertz to 15,000 Hertz, and the popular condenser RODE NT1000, which hears everything from 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz. And let's also remember what we’re doing here: we need these devices for recording vocals, not rain sounds in a forest.
The specialists from iZotope, a company that produces excellent software for mixing and mastering, tell us that the main range (fundamental frequencies) of absolutely all singers on Earth lies in the area of approximately 100 to 1000 Hertz. And the harmonics (overtones) of their voices – in the area from 1000 to 16,000 Hertz.
So, when recording in the studio, we are primarily interested in the range of 100 to 16,000 Hertz. Some bass singers with a rich bass can produce tones below 100 Hertz – somewhere near 82 Hertz – and some sopranos with coloratura soprano can land above 1000 Hertz but this is extremely rare. And, usually, singers like that are not recording demos in their bedroom home studio.
If we talk about female voices, then the same coloratura soprano does not generally rise above 1397 Hertz (the fundamental frequencies of the voice). So where did the recommendation from iZotope to pay attention to frequencies up to the border of 16,000 Hertz when mixing vocals come from?
In the area above the coloratura soprano, there is a high part of the spectrum of consonant sounds in the human voice - high-frequency chirping and the not all that pleasant to the ear hissing "s".
Also, there are some very high overtones of the human voice. Something in the area of squeaking and creaking. Sometimes sound engineers call this area “air.”
Somewhat ironically, a significant portion of the sound engineers themselves, as well as musicians and listeners in adulthood, can no longer hear sounds at a frequency of 14,000 Hertz and higher.
As we can see, the Shure SM58 microphone loses only a narrow band from 15,000 to 16,000 Hertz. But this is such a formality that it can frankly be ignored. Let's repeat that: most adults hear the frequency range called "air" poorly or very poorly.
On a vocal recording in the frequency range up to 15,000 Hertz, the sound engineer has enough space to add clarity and emphasize high-frequency “brilliance.”
Generally speaking, a singer needs to sing very close to a microphone when singing softly, and temporarily move away when singing loudly for all the nuances of the vocals to be audible.
This is a basic stage skill that everyone has to learn. Sensitive condenser microphones are not used on stage because they would capture the sound from all other nearby instruments, from all the monitors, guitars and bass guitars, from amplifiers, from sounds bouncing in from the hallway outside, etc.. It would result in muddying.
The relative low sensitivity of the dynamic microphone on stage (or, for our purposes, a bedroom studio) has an isolating function for sound garbage.
In short, if a beginner singer or rapper decides to record in a home studio, they will have to acquire this skill. You don’t have to shout into the microphone, you just have to create an awareness in yourself of where the mic is.
Yes, condenser microphones often have a flatter frequency response than dynamic ones. But let's be realistic: what sound source on the planet actually has a flat frequency response? The answer: a source that produces "white noise," like a software synthesizer.
Any instrument (including vocals), emitting tonal sounds and recorded through any device (even the most expensive microphone in the world) will not sound perfect on the recording right away. The recording will require frequency correction in nearly every case.
High-quality dynamic microphones don't do anything extreme with the sound, like skyrocketing high frequencies. It's usually pretty comfortable working with the sounds obtained from a dynamic microphone.
