J. Anthony Allen recommends the Shure SM7B (~$200) for vocals and podcasting because it handles dialogue well and filters background noise. For USB-only setups, the Blue Yeti offers dual outputs and captures room sound. Skip expensive studio condensers for home recording.
Let's say you want to record vocals and maybe you want to do like podcast stuff. Podcast stuff, voiceover work, anything like that. The kind of hip thing to do right now and for a kind of good reason. If you watch video of people talking on a podcast, they're using one of these a lot. This is the very fashionable microphone to use. This is an SM7. Like I said, I think this is an SM7B. I don't remember the price point on these right now. I think it's around $200. So it's not crazy. They're a great microphone for dialog, for talking, they're a great vocal microphone for singing in general. They really filter out background noise a lot. So if you want to do podcast stuff and have 200 bucks, this is a great one to to get. Now if you're not going to get an audio interface and your only option is a microphone that is a USB microphone, then I have a hard time with recommendations because I don't have a lot of experience with USB microphones, but I do have experience with this. This one. This is the blue Yeti microphone. The thing I really liked about this one and the reason I bought it is because it does have a analog output so I could use my audio interface if I wanted to. It's got this special five pin thing, but it comes with an adapter cable to get it into a normal XLR three pin cable. But it also has a USB out and it sounds pretty darn good. This is a condenser microphone. It's very sensitive. It's going to pick up a lot of stuff. So it's a great like room mic. Like if you just want to record everything that's happening in a room, like a band rehearsal or something, this is a really good one for that. The Blue company actually makes really great mics. They have a really cheap version of this called like the Snowball or something like that. I have one somewhere actually. Those are, you know, not so good, but this one's great. Okay, so that's my mic buying advice. Something like this one that I held up, don't buy one of these. The only reason you should buy one of these is if you have a recording studio and money to burn. I'm sorry to say they're great and they sound great, but if you've got a home studio and you're recording a few instruments here and there, you don't need something like that. You need, you know, 150 bucks for an SM58 and you're going to be up and running and doing just great. Okay, let's get back to live and talk about how we record stuff in live.
