J. Anthony Allen explains why microphones range from $50 to $50,000 and walks through three types: condensers for vocals, measurement mics for room testing, and dynamic mics like the Shure SM58 for drums and live sound. A used SM57 or SM58 costs around $150 and works as the best starter mic.
Okay, next, let's talk about microphones. So just like speakers, microphones can be anywhere from $50 to $50,000 for a single microphone. They can be insane. In fact, whenever, if you see ever advertised a recording studio and they say this is a, you know, 10 million dollar recording studio, probably 9 million of that is in microphones. Microphones are expensive and a good recording studio has a wide variety of really nice microphones. In order to do professional recording you need a lot of them because they're all specific to different situations. But if you're just learning how to do some stuff and you just want to try out the waters, there's one microphone that, that I would recommend getting. If you want to buy a microphone, which you don't need to do at this point. But if you're dying to make some sound, let me tell you some stuff. So I have here three microphones. This one's a little fancier. This is what's called a condenser microphone. It's going to pick up a lot of sound and be much less focused than some other microphones. Meaning if I plug this in right now, you would hear. You might hear like planes flying over and things like that in addition to my voice. But other sound from elsewhere. One that looks like this. This is actually a measurement microphone. Don't get one of these. This is like to measure the acoustic properties of a room. I just happen to have it sitting next to my desk. This one is your good all purpose microphone. This is called a dynamic microphone, meaning that it can handle a lot of volume dynamics is what we call volume. They are not very fragile. They can really take a beating. If you've ever gone to a show in a bar or a club, you've seen probably 20 or 30 of these on the stage. This is called a Shure SM58. Okay. There's also the Shure SM57. Both of those are good. Any recording studio is going to have a drawer full of these things. They are the standard microphone that everybody has a bunch of. They're about 150 bucks. So for 150 bucks you can get the same microphone that's in a bunch of recording studios. And they use these in recording studios in some situations. Other situations are going to use something more like this, which is much more delicate and picks up sound in a much more delicate way. But sometimes they use this. These are great for vocals. These are great for drums. Although you need a lot of them to put all over the drums. They're good for amps. If you want to get a guitar sound, throw one of these in front of your guitar amp. You'll get a great sound out of it. So if you can only buy one microphone in your entire life, get an SM58 or an SM57. Look around online, find one used because they're super durable. It'll be fine. That's what I recommend.
