The Mics of Jessamine
By Larry Crane, with Jessamine
reprinted with permission from Tape Op, No. 7
There's this cool band, Jessamine, who have several albums out that they've recorded themselves (on Kranky and their own Histrionic label). The music is great, dreamy weird stuff (trust me). They've been living in Portland for a while now and have been setting up a fancy, new 16 track recording setup in their classy digs in preparation for recording the next record. I got together with Andy (keyboards) and Rex (guitar/vox) to talk about a bunch of their new microphone acquisitions and some of their old standbys.
"The thing that we should say is that all of these things came recommended to us..."
Altec "Lipstick" microphones
Too bad we don't have a picture. They're about the size of a lipstick canister-thing and sort of grayish and permanently attached to this cable that goes to the tube preamp 1/2 rack sized thing.
So they're little tube powered condensers?
Yeah, they have different capsules for them and we have the omni ones, we determined, but we don't really know. Maybe a wide pattern cardioid.
What do you use them for?
Mainly just on overheads but they sound great on just about anything. We used them, stereo, on guitar amps, with a AKG 414, which sounds incredible. They're really good and crisp. Great room sound, a really good ambient mic. The most incredible sounds we'd got were when we used these as a stereo pair with another mic to fill in the bass range. We haven't really experimented too much with vocals. We just got all these things recently.
pair for $1000, used
Audio Technica 4033
It's really amazing for the price. That's the thing that we've been into... the best thing we could get for the little amount of money we had to spend. We use it for the bass right now. It sounded good any time we used it on anything. We tried it on drums. It just gets the full frequency spectrum. We're trying to find specific microphones for specific jobs. We got 4 or 5 new mics in 2 weeks so we'd just track all the mics on each thing, with combinations too. We'd have 5 or 6 mics on one tom, record 6 tracks of that and then listen back and see how they sound. We just had to know what they were gonna do.
$420 used / $500 new
Sennheiser 421
We picked one up and I've been incredibly disappointed with it. I think we might have gotten ripped off. This one, in particular, sounds super high-endy, with no upper mids, and then a low end. It's supposed to be famous for its good low end. Whatever we were trying to do with it wasn't working out for toms or bass or anything.
Did you get it used from someone?
Yeah. Should we got it serviced? We'll send them a note, "Is this mic supposed to sound like this?"
"Please send me a 57!"
$380 now
Beyer 260
We should just let you borrow it sometime! I cannot believe how smooth it sounds. You hear that about ribbon mics, "Oh, they're smooth," but actually hearing it... it just smooths it out. I don't know how to explain it. It still sounds really good and clear. We haven't really tried it on drums. It's recommended for female vocals and strings. We tried it out on vocals but that was live.
$250 new
We use it, right now, on our upper tom. We heard that, in combination with a SM 98 (which we don't have) this makes a great snare mic. It's got the punch. The initial attack is so present but it doesn't fill out the high range of the snare sound. On a tom it sounds great and it's a good step up, especially on drums, from an SM 57.
Kick drum....
Yeah. We had a snare mic and two 57's that picked the overheads. For a while, a 57 on the kick until we got the D 112. You can definitely tell which songs it's on. Anyway, we used the 414 on vocals and since on guitar quite a bit. It's got a really nice bass range. Initially we borrowed a 414 and we heard the difference. The person [singing] was right here! And weird things like switchable mic patterns... we never had any of them! We were using it for a room mic and we've used it for a drum overhead. It's really nice and versatile.
