When it comes to trying to achieve a great tone for your guitar, it seems that speakers get all the attention. But if you’ve ever spent an hour (or a few) wrestling with a speaker cabinet setup, you’ll know that what mic you use, and especially where it’s positioned, can make a huge difference too.
True, you’ll never make a Vintage 30 sound like an Alnico Blue just by switching microphones or moving it around, but you can do a lot to affect whether the tone feels bright or dull, full or thin. Which is why, when we planned the recording of our speaker IRs, we knew we had to think about which microphones to use, and how to position them, very carefully. It soon became obvious that no single microphone could do justice to the range of tones possible from a single speaker – because there are so many different mics being used by guitarists, either at home or in a studio.
So we chose 4 “desert island mics” to work with: the Royer R-121 ribbon mic, the Sennheiser MD421 dynamic mic, the ever popular Shure SM57 (also a dynamic mic) and the Neumann TLM 107 condenser mic. You can find out more about why we chose these microphones and how we used them to create our impulse response downloads, here.
Check out the Celestion Speaker IR range here.
