J. Anthony Allen breaks down three microphone types for home recording. Dynamic mics like the Shure SM7 and SM58 handle loud sources well and work for vocals and drums, but skip ribbon mics unless you need something specialized. A follow-up covers which mic to actually buy.
Okay, let's talk about microphones. So again, I could talk for hours and hours about different types of microphones and what you might want to get and might not want to get, but we don't have time for that in this class. So instead I'm going to go through the super basics about microphones. In the next video we'll talk about for your situation, what you might consider buying. So in short, there are three ish different types of microphones. There are dynamic microphones, condenser microphones and ribbon microphones. Ribbon microphones are a pretty specialized thing and unless you're building a whole recording studio, I would not worry about getting one of those. They're fragile, they probably don't do anything you can't do with the other two in a very basic way. So don't worry, don't worry about ribbon microphones for now. So dynamic microphones look like this. If you asked a five year old to draw a picture of a microphone, they're probably going to draw this microphone. This is a dynamic microphone. What a dynamic microphone is good at is just screaming into it. It's good at loud stuff, quiet stuff. It's very versatile and they are not very fragile. You can, you know, drop this in a bunch of, in a cup of beer and it'll be just fine. This microphone is called an SM7 and this is actually kind of a fancy dynamic microphone. But this microphone is called an SM58. This is actually like kind of a different version of it called a beta 58. But basically an SM58 is the most standard microphone anyone has that exists anywhere. These are great live microphones and these are great for recording if you're recording vocals, especially if it's like a rock vocal, a rap or anything that's not like a super delicate, like maybe an opera vocal, I wouldn't record with one of these. But most pop music vocals, these are great for, they're great for drums. You know, put this on your snare drum, on your hi hat, on your kick drum, they're just great.
