Microphones

I have two mics in front of me when sitting at my MIDI console. One is a Shure SM57. I did a lot of reading on mics and I chose that because everybody seemed to agree that it was a decent mic for the price. I wasn't spending more than $200 on a mic. This one cost me $125 and it feeds directly into my TC Helicon Voicemaster to provide harmony voices. The TC can do a lot of stuff. It can mute your input voice and only output the harmonies. A harmony can be one octave up or down so you can up your voice one octave and give it different characteristics, like a female voice. Your harmonies can follow various rules of harmony set out by the Voicemaster but, in my case, the feature I will be using is the MIDI track input. You can assign three midi channels and use the incoming notes to determine the harmony voice. This is pretty bulletproof. I don't want to take a chance that the harmony voice will come out differently than the original recording.

My main mic is the Sennheiser e835, again a really good lower cost mic according to my research. It cost me $135 for a mic/stand package. Since my other boom mic stand cost me $40, that means the mic was less than $100. I bought a second mic when I bought my Yamaha KX8 88 key piano. I wanted it to do piano-oriented songs like those by Jerry Lee Lewis and piano instrumentals. Both my e835s feed into my M-Audio M400 Firewire interface. It has two mic inputs with front panel switches where I can turn one off and the other one on very quickly to move from my console to my piano for a song. These mic channels are routed to computer no 3, inside a custom made case for my KX8. It runs Cubase software which I have in the monitor mode. Then, I assign effects to a voice track and that track is then routed to an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 interface on computer 3 which then sends my voice to my mixer front panel into one of the lead voice inputs. That gets mixed out into one audio signal and goes from there into the DI8 mixer and so onto the amp and speakers.